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Sesame and Lilies 



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BY 

JOHN RUSKIN 



BOSTON 
SAMUEL E. CASSINO 



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Noriuooti ISrrss: 
Berwick & Smith, Boston, U.S.A. 



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PREFACE. 



Being now fifty-one years old, and little likely 
to change my mind hereafter on any important 
subject of thought (unless through weakness of 
age), I wish to publish a connected series of 
such parts of my works as now seem to me right, 
and likely to be of permanent use. In doing so 
I shall omit much, but not attempt to mend 
what I think worth reprinting. A young man 
necessarily writes otherwise than an old one, 
and it would be worse than wasted time to try 
to recast the juvenile language : nor is it to be 
thought that I am ashamed even of what I can- 
cel ; for great part of my earlier work was rap- 
idly written for temporary purposes, and is 
now r.nnecessary, though true, even to truism. 
What )te about religion, was, on the con- 

trarv ^.mstaking, and, I think, forcible, as 
cor^ared with most religious writing; espe- 
ciaxly ' V its frankness and fearlessness : but it 
was wholly mistaken ; for I had been educated 
in the doctrines of a narrow sect, and had read 
history as obliquely as sectarians necessarily 
must. 

3 



4 PREFACE, 

Mingled among these either unnecessary or 
erroneous statements, I find, indeed, some that 
might be still of value ; but these, in my earlier 
books, disfigured by affected language, partly 
through the desire to be thought a fine writer, 
and partly, as in the second volume of " Modern 
Painters," in the notion of returning as far as I 
could to what I thought the better style of old 
English literature, especially to that of my then 
favorite, in prose, Richard Hooker. 

For these reasons, though; as respects either 
art, policy, or morality as distinct from religion, 
I not only still hold, but I would even wish 
strongly to re-affirm the substance of what I 
said in my earliest books, I shall reprint 
scarcely anything in this series out of the first 
and second volumes of " Modern Painters ; ''and 
shall omit much of the " Seven Lamps" and 
" Stones of Venice : *' but all my books written 
within the last fifteen years will be republished 
without change, as new editions of them are 
called for, wuth here and there perhaps an ad- 
ditional note, and having their text divided, for 
convenient reference, into paragraphs consecu- 
tive through each volume. I shall also throw 
together the shorter fragments that bear on 
each other, and fill in with such unprinted lec- 
tures or studies as seem to me worth pre- 
serving, so as to keep the volumes, on an 



PREFACE. 5 

average, composed of about a hundred leaves 
each. 

The first book of which a new edition is re- 
quired chances to be " Sesame and Lilies," from 
which I now detach the old preface, about the 
Alps, for use elsewhere ; and to which I add a 
lecture given in Ireland on a subject closely 
connected with that of the book itself. I am 
glad that it should be the first of the complete 
series, for many reasons ; though in now look- 
ing over these two lectures, I am painfully 
struck by the waste of good work in them. 
They cost me much thought, and much strong 
emotion ; but it was foolish to suppose that I could 
rouse my audiences in a little while to any sym- 
pathy with the temper into which I had brought 
myself by years of thinking over subjects full of 
pain ; while, if I missed my purpose at the time, 
it was little to be hoped I could attain it after- 
wards ; since phrases written for oral delivery 
become inelTective when quietly read. Yet I 
should only take away what good is in them if 
I tried to translate them into the language of 
books ; nor, indeed, could I at all have done so 
at the time of their delivery, my thoughts then 
habitually and impatiently putting themselves 
into forms fit only for emphatic speech ; and 
thus I am startled, in my review of them, to 
find that, though there is much, (forgive me the 



6 PREFACE. 

impertinence) which seems to me accurately and 
energetically said, there is scarcely anything put 
in a form to be generally convincing, or even 
easily intelligible ; and I can well imagine a 
reader laying down the book without being at 
all moved by it, still less guided, to any defi- 
nite course of action. 

I think, however, if I now say briefly and 
clearly what I meant my hearers to understand, 
and what I wanted, and still would fain have, 
them to do, there may afterwards be found 
some better service in the passionately written 
text. 

The first Lecture says, or tries to say, that, 
life being very short, and the quiet hours of it 
few, we ought to waste none of them in reading 
valueless books ; and that valuable books should, 
in a civilized country, be within the reach of 
every one, printed in excellent form, for a just 
price ; but not in any vile, vulgar, or, by reason of 
smallness of type, physically injurious form, at 
a vile price. For we none of us need many books, 
and those which we need ought to be clearly 
printed, on the best paper, and strongly bound. 
And though we are, indeed, now, a wretched 
and poverty-struck nation, and hardly able to 
keep soul and body together, still, as no person 
in decent circumstances would put on his table 
confessedly bad wine, or bad meat, without 



PREFACE. 7 

being ashamed, so he need not have on his 
shelves ill-printed or loosely and wretchedly- 
stitched books ; for, though few can be rich, 
yet every man who honestly exerts himself may, 
I think, still provide, for himself and his family, 
good shoes, good gloves, strong harness for his 
cart or carriage horses and stout leather binding 
for his books. And I would urge upon every 
young man, as the beginning of his due and 
wise provision for his household, to obtain as 
soon as he can, by the severest economy, a 
restricted, serviceable, and steadily — however 
slowly — increasing, series of books for use 
through life ; making his little library, of all 
the furniture in his room, the most studied 
and decorative piece; every volume having its 
assigned place, like a little statue in its niche, 
and one of the earliest and strictest lessons to 
the children of the house being how to turn the 
pages of their own literary possessions lightly 
and deliberately, with no chance of tearing or 
dogs^ ears. 

That is my notion of the founding of King's 
Treasuries ; and the first Lecture is intended to 
show somewhat the use and preciousness of 
their treasures : but the two following ones 
have wider scope, being written in the hope 
of awakening the youth of England, so far as 
my poor words might have any power witlj. 



O PREFACE. 

them, to take some thought of the purposes of the 
life into which they are entering, and the nature 
of the world they have to conquer. 

These two lectures are fragmentary and ill- 
arranged, but not, I think, diffuse or much com- 
pressible. The entire gist and conclusion of 
them, however, is in the last six paragraphs, 
135 to the end, of the third lecture, which I 
would beg the reader to look over not once 
nor twice (rather than any other part of the 
book), for they contain the best expression I 
have yet been able to put in words of what, so 
far as is within my power, I mean henceforward 
both to do myself, and to plead with all over 
whom I have any influence, to do also accord- 
ing to their means : the letters begun on the 
first day of this year, to the workmen of Eng- 
land, having the object of originating, if possi- 
ble, this movement among them, in true alliance 
with whatever trustworthy element of help they 
can find in the higher classes. After these para- 
graphs, let me ask you to read, by the fiery light 
of recent events, the fable at p. 116 (§ 117), and 
then §§ 129- 131; and observe, my statement 
respecting the famine at Orissa is not rhetorical, 
but certified by official documents as within the 
truth. Five hundred thousand persons at least, 
died by starvation in our British dominions, 
•Avholly in consequence of carelessness and want 



PREFACE. 9 

of forethouglit. Keep that well in your mem- 
ory ; and note it as the best possible illustration 
of modern political economy in true practice, 
and of the relations it has accomplished be- 
tween Supply and Demand. Then begin the 
second lecture, and all will read clear enough, I 
think, to the end ; only, since that second lec- 
ture was written, questions have arisen respect- 
ing the education and claims of women which 
have greatly troubled simple minds and excited 
restless ones, I am sometimes asked my 
thoughts on this matter, and I suppose that 
some girl readers of the second lecture may at 
the end of it desire to be told summarily what I 
would have them do and desire in the present 
state of things. This, then, is what I would 
say to any girl who had confidence enough in 
me to believe what I told her, or do what I ask 
her. 

First, be quite sure of one thing, that, however 
much you may know, and whatever advantages 
you may possess, and however good you may 
be, you have not been singled out, by the God 
who made you, from all the other girls in the 
world, to be especially informed respecting His 
own nature and character. You have not been 
born in a luminous point upon the surface of 
the globe, where a perfect theology might be 
expounded to you from your youth up, and 



10 PREFACE. 

where everything you were taught would be 
true, and everything that was enforced upon 
you, right. Of all the insolent, all the foolish 
persuasions that by any chance could enter and 
hold your empty little heart, this is the proudest 
and foolishest, — that you have been so much 
the darling of the Heavens, and favorite of the 
Fates, as to be born in the very nick of time, 
and in the punctual place, when and where pure 
Divine truth had been sifted from the errors of 
the Nations ; and that your papa had been 
providentially disposed to buy a house in the 
convenient neighborhood of the steeple under 
which that Immaculate and final verity would 
be beautifully proclaimed. Do not think it, 
child ; it is not so. This, on the contrary, is 
the fact, — unpleasant you may think it; pleas- 
ant, it seems to inc, — that you, with all your 
pretty dresses, and dainty looks, and kindly 
thoughts, and saintly aspirations, are not one 
whit more thought oi or loved by the great 
Maker and Master than any poor little red, 
black, or blue savage, running wild in the pes- 
tilent woods, or naked on the hot sands of the 
earth : and that, of the two, you probably know 
less about Cod than she does ; the only ditTer- 
ence being that she thinks little of Him that is 
right, and you, much that is wrong. 

That, then, is the first thing to make sure 



PREFACE. II 

of; — that you are not yet perfectly well in- 
formed on the most abstruse of all possible sub- 
jects, and that, if you care to behave with 
modesty or propriety, you had better be silent 
about it. 

The second thing which you may make sure 
of is, that however good you may be, you have 
faults ; that however dull you may be, you can 
find out what some of them are ; and that how- 
ever slight they may be, you had better make 
some — not too painful, but patient — effort to 
get quit of them. And so far as you have con- 
fidence in me at all, trust me for this, that how 
many soever you may find or fancy your faults 
to be, there are only two that are of real conse- 
quence, — Idleness and Cruelty. Perhaps you 
may be proud. Well, we can get much good 
out of pride, if only it be not religious. Per- 
haps you may be vain : it is highly probable ; 
and very pleasant for the people who like to 
praise you. Perhaps you are a little envious : 
that is really very shocking ; but then — so is 
everybody else. Perhaps, also, you are a little 
malicious, which I am truly concerned to hear, 
but should probably only the more, if I knew 
you, enjoy your conversation. But whatever 
else you may be, you must not be useless, and 
you must not be cruel. If there is any one 
point which, in six thousand years of thinking 



12 PREFACE. 

about right and wrong, wise and good men have 
agreed upon, or successively by experience dis- 
covered, it is that God dislikes idle and cruel 
people more than any other ; — that His first 
order is, " Work while you have light ; '' and His 
second, " Be merciful while you have mercy." 

" Work while you have light," especially while 
you have the light of morning. There are few 
things more wonderful to me than that old peo- 
ple never tell young ones how precious their 
youth is. They sometimes sentimentally regret 
their own earlier days ; sometimes prudently for- 
get them ; often foolishly rebuke the young, 
often more foolishly indulge, often most fool- 
ishly thwart and restrain; but scarcely ever 
warn or watch them. Remember, then, that I, 
at least, have warned j^*?^, that the happiness of 
your life, and its power, and its part and rank 
in earth or in heaven, depend on the way you 
pass your day snow. They are not to be sad 
days ; far from that, the first duty of young peo- 
ple is to be delighted and delightful ; out they 
are to be in the deepest sense solemn days. 
There is no solemnity so deep, to a rightly- 
thinking creature, as that of dawn. But not 
only in that beautiful sense, but in all their 
character and method, they are to be solemn 
days. Take your Latin dictionary, and look 
out " sollennis," and fix the sense of the word 



PREFACE. 13 

well in your mind, and remember that everyday 
of your early life is ordaining irrevocably, for 
good or evil, the custom and practice of your 
soul; ordaining either sacred customs of dear 
and lovely recurrence, or trenching deeper and 
deeper the furrows for seed of sorrow. Now, 
therefore, see that no day passes in which you 
do not make yourself a somewhat better crea- 
ture ; and in order to do that, find out, first, 
what you are now. Do not think vaguely about 
it ; take pen and paper, and write down as ac- 
curate a description of yourself as you can, with 
the date to it. If you dare not do so, find out 
why you dare not, and try to get strength of 
heart enough to look yourself feirly in the face, 
in mind as well as body. I do not doubt but 
that the mind is a less pleasant thing to look at 
than the face, and for that very reason it needs 
more looking at ; so always have two mirrors on 
your toilet table, and see that with proper care 
you dress body and mind before them daily. 
After the dressing is once over for the day, 
think no more about it : as your hair will blow 
about your ears, so your temper and thoughts 
will get ruffled with the day's work, and may 
need, sometimes, twice dressing ; but I don't 
want you to carry about a mental pocket-comb ; 
only to be smooth braided always in the morn- 



14 PREFACE. 

Write down then, frankly, what you are, or, 
at least, what you think yourself, not dwelling 
upon those inevitable faults which I have just 
told you are of little consequence, and which the 
action of a right life will shake or smooth away ; 
but that you may determine to the best of your 
intelligence what you are good for, and can be 
made into. You will find that the mere resolve 
not to be useless, and the honest desire to help 
other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest 
ways, improve yourself. Thus, from the begin- 
ning, consider all your accomplishments as means 
of assistance to others ; read attentively, in this 
volume, paragraphs 74, 75, 19, and 79, and you 
will understand what I mean, with respect to 
languages and music. In music especially you 
will soon find what personal benefit there is in 
being serviceable : it is probable that, however 
limited your powers, you have voice and ear 
enough to sustain a note of moderate compass in 
a concerted piece ; — that, then, is the first thing 
to make sure you can do. Get your voice disci- 
plined and clear, and think only of accuracy; 
never of effect or expression : if you have any 
soul worth expressing it will show itself in your 
singing ; but most likely there are very few feel- 
ings in you, at present, needing any particular 
expression ; and the one thing you have to do is 
to make a clear-voiced little instrument of your- 



PREFACE. 15 

self, which other people can entirely depend upon 
ibrthe note wanted. So, in drawing, as soon as 
you can set down the right shape of anything, 
and thereby explain its character to another 
person, or make the look of it clear and inter- 
esting to a child, you will begin to enjoy 
the art vividly for its own sake, and all your 
habits of mind and powers of memory will gain 
precision : but if you only try to make showy 
drawings for praise, or pretty ones for amuse- 
ment, your drawing will have little of real 
interest for you, and no educational power 
whatever. 

Then, besides this more delicate work, resolve 
to do every day some that is useful in the vulgar 
sense. Learn first thoroughly the economy of 
the kitchen ; the good and bad qualities of every 
common article of food, and the simplest and 
best modes of their preparation : when you have 
time, go and help in the cooking of poorer fami- 
lies, and show them how to make as much of 
everything as possible, and how to make little, 
nice ; coaxing and tempting them into tidy and 
pretty ways, and pleading for well-folded table- 
cloths, however coarse, and for a flower or two 
out of the garden to strew on them. If you 
manage to get a clean table-cloth, bright plates 
on it, and a good dish in the middle, of your 
own cooking, you may ask leave to say a short 



1 6 PREFACE. 

grace; and let your religious ministries be con- 
fined to that much for the present. 

Again, let a certain part of your day (as little 
as you choose, but not to be broken in upon) be 
set apart for making strong and pretty dresses 
for the poor. Learn the sound qualities of all 
useful stuffs, and make everything of the best 
you can get, whatever its price. I have many 
reasons for desiring you to do this, — too many 
to be told just now, — trust me, and be sure you 
get everything as good as can be : and if, in 
the villanous state of modern trade, you cannot 
get it good at any price, buy its raw material, 
and set some of the poor women about you to 
spin and weave, till you have got stuff that can 
be trusted : and then, every day, make some 
little piece of useful dothing, sewn with your own 
fingers as strongly as it can be stitched ; and 
embroider it or otherwise beautify it moderately 
with fine needlework, such as a girl may be 
proud of having done. And accumulate these 
things by you until you hear of some honest per- 
sons in need of clothing, which may often too 
sorrowfully be ; and, even though you should be 
deceived, and give them to the dishonest, and 
hear of their being at once taken to the pawn- 
broker's, never mind that, for the pawnbroker 
must sell them to some one who has need of 
them. That is no business of yours ; what con- 



PREFACE. ly 

cerns you is only that when you see a half-naked 
child, you should have good and fresh clothes to 
give it, if its parents will let it be taught to wear 
them. If they will not, consider how they came 
to be of such a mind, which it will be wholesome 
for you beyond most subjects of inquiry to ascer- 
tain. And after you have gone on doing this a 
little while, you will begin to understand the 
meaning of at least one chapter of your Bible, 
Proverbs xxxi., without need of any labored 
comment, sermon, or meditation. 

In these, then (and of course in all minor ways 
besides, that you can discover in your own house- 
hold), you must be to the best of your strength 
usefully employed during the greater part of the 
day, so that you may be able at the end of it to 
say, as proudly as any peasant, that you have 
not eaten the bread of idleness. Then, sec- 
ondly, I said, you are not to be cruel. Per- 
haps you think there is no chance of your being 
so ; and indeed I hope it is not likely that you 
should be deliberately unkind to any creature ; 
but unless you are deliberately kind to every 
creature, you will often be cruel to many. Cruel, 
partly through want of imagination (a far rarer 
and weaker faculty in women than men), and 
yet more, at the present day, through the subtle 
encouragement of your selfishness by the reli- 
gious doctrine that all which we now suppose to 



1 8 PREFACE. 

be evil will be brought to a good end ; doctrine 
practically issuing, not in less earnest efforts that 
the immediate unpleasantness may be averted 
from ourselves, but in our remaining satisfied in 
the contemplation of its ultimate objects, when 
it is inflicted on others. 

It is not likely that the more accurate methods 
of recent mental education will now long permit 
young people to grow up in the persuasion that, 
in any danger or distress, they may e:?Jpect to be 
themselves saved by the providence of God, 
while those around them are lost by His Im- 
providence : but they may be yet long restrained 
from rightly kind action, and long accustomed 
to endure both their own pain occasionally, and 
the pain of others always, with an unwise pa- 
tience, by misconception of the eternal and 
incurable nature of real evil. Observe, there- 
fore, carefully in this matter : there are degrees 
of pain, as degrees of faultfulness, which are 
altogether conquerable, and which seem to be 
merely forms of wholesome trial or discipline. 
Your fingers tingle when you go out on a frosty 
morning, and are all the warmer afterwards ; 
your limbs are weary with wholesome work, 
and lie down in the pleasanter rest ; you are 
tried for a little while by having to wait for some 
promised good, and it is all the sweeter when it 
comes. But you cannot carry the trial past a 



PREFACE. 19 

certain point. Let the cold fasten on your hand 
in an extreme degree, and your fingers will 
moulder from their sockets. Fatigue yourself, 
but once, to utter exhaustion, and to the end 
of life you shall not recover the former vigor of 
your frame. Let heart-sickness pass beyond a 
certain bitter point, and the heart loses its life 
forever. 

Now, the very definition of evil is in this 
irremediableness. It means sorrow, or sin, 
which end in death ; and assuredly, as far as 
we know, or can conceive, there are many con- 
ditions both of pain and sin which cannot but so 
end. Of course we are ignorant and blind 
creatures, and we cannot know what seeds of 
good may be in present suffering, or present 
crime ; but with what we cannot know, we are 
not concerned. It is conceivable that murderers 
and liars may in some distant world be exalted 
into a higher humanity than they could have 
reached without homicide or falsehood ; but 
the contingency is not one by which our 
actions should be guided. There is, indeed, 
a better hope that the beggar, who lies at our 
gates in misery, may, within gates of pearl be 
comforted ; but the Master, whose words are 
our only authority for thinking so, never Him- 
self inflicted disease as a blessing, nor sent away 
the hungry unfed, or the wounded unhealed. 



20 PREFACE. 

Believe me, then, the only right principle of 
action here, is to consider good and evil as 
defined by our natural sense of both ; and. to 
strive to promote the one, and to conquer the 
other, w^ith as hearty endeavor as if there were, 
indeed, no other world than this. Above all, 
get quit of the absurd idea that Heaven will 
interfere to correct great errors, while allowing 
its laws to take their course in punishing small 
ones. If yoi\ prepare a dish of food carelessly, 
you do not expect Providence to make it palata- 
ble ; neither, if, through years of folly, you mis- 
guide your own life, need you expect Divine 
interference to bring round everything at last 
for the best. I tell you, positively, the world is 
not so constituted : the consequences of great 
mistakes are just as sure as those of small ones, 
and the happiness of your whole life, and of all 
the lives over which you have power, depends 
as literally on your own common sense and dis- 
cretion as the excellence and order of the feast 
of a day. 

Think carefully and bravely over these things, 
and you will find them true : having found them 
so, think also carefully over your own position 
in life. I assume that you belong to the middlQi 
or upper classes, and that you would shrink 
from descending into a lower sphere. You may 
fancy you would not : nay, if you are very good, 



PREFACE. 21 

strong-hearted, and romantic, perhaps you really 
would not ; but it is not wrong that you should. 
You have then, I suppose, good food, pretty 
rooms to live in, pretty dresses to wear, power 
of obtaining every rational and wholesome pleas- 
ure ; you are, moreover, probably gentle and 
grateful, and in the habit of every day thanking 
God for these things. But why do you thank 
Him? Is it because, in these matters, as well as 
in your religious knowledge, you think He has 
made a favorite of you? Is the essential mean- 
ing of your thanksgiving, " Lord, I thank thee 
that I am not as other girls are, not in that I 
fast twice in the week while they feast, but in 
in that I feast seven times a week, while they 
fast,'' and are you quite sure this is a pleasing 
form of thanksgiving to your Heavenly Father? 
Suppose you saw one of your own true earthly 
sisters, Lucy or Emily, cast out of your mortal 
father's house, starving, helpless, heartbroken; 
and that every morning when you went into your 
father's room, you said to him, " How good you 
are, father, to give me what you don't give Lucy," 
are you sure that, whatever anger your parent 
might have just cause for, against your sister, he 
would be pleased by that thanksgiving, or flat- 
tered by that praise? Nay, are you even sure 
that you are so much the favorite : suppose that, 
all this while, he loves poor Lucy just as well as 



22 PREFACE. 

you, and is only trying you through her pain, 
and perhaps not angry with her in anywise, but 
deeply angry with you, and all the more for your 
thanksgivings? Would it not be well that you 
should think, and earnestly too over this stand- 
ing of yours : and all the more if you wish to be- 
lieve that text, which clergymen so much dislike 
preaching on, " How hardly shall they that have 
riches enter into the Kingdom of God ? " You 
do not believe it now, or you would be less com- 
placent in your state ; and you cannot believe it 
at all, until you know that the Kingdom of God 
means — " not meat and drink, but justice, peace, 
and joy in the Holy Ghost," nor until you know 
also that such joy is not by any means, necessa- 
; rily, in going to church, or in singing hymns ; 
li but may be joy in a dance, or joy in a jest, or 
! joy in anything you have deserved to possess, or 
j that you are willing to give ; but joy in nothing 
1 that separates you, as by any strange favor, from 
\your fellow-creatures, that exalts you through 
jtheir degradation — exempts you from their toil 
i — or indulges you in time of their distress. 

Think, then, and some day, I believe, you will 
feel also — no morbid passion of pity such as 
would turn you into a black Sister of Charity, 
but the steady fire of perpetual kindness which 
will make you a bright one. I speak in no dis- 
paragement of them ; I know well how good the 



PREFACE. 23 

Sisters of Charity are, and how much we owe to 
them ; but all these professional pieties (except 
so far as distinction or association may be neces- 
sary for effectiveness of work) are in their spirit 
wrong, and in practice merely plaster the sores 
of disease that ought never have been per- 
mitted to exist ; encouraging at the same time 
the herd of less excellent women in frivolity, by 
leading them to think that they must either be 
good up to the black standard, or cannot be 
good for anything. Wear a costume, by all 
means, if you like ; but let it be a cheerful and 
becoming one ; and be in your heart a Sister of 
Charity always, without either veiled or voluble 
declaration of it. 

As I pause, before ending my preface — think- 
ing of one or two more points that are difficult 
to write of — I find a letter in The Times, from 
a French lady, which says all I want so beau- 
tifully, that I will print it just as it stands : — 

Sir, — It is often said that one example is 
worth many sermons. Shall I be judged pre- 
sumptuous if I point out one, which seems to 
me so striking just now, that, however painful, 
1 cannot help dwelling upon it? 

It is the share, the sad and large share, that 
French society and its recent habits of luxury, 
of expenses, of dress, of indulgence in every 



24 PREFACE. 

kind of extravagant dissipation, has to lay to its 
own door in its actual crisis of ruin, misery, and 
humiliation. If our ifitiiag^rcs can be cited as 
an example to English housewives, so, alas ! 
can other classes of our society be set up as an 
example — not to be followed. 

Bitter must be the feelings of many a French 
woman whose days of luxury and expensive 
habits are at an end : and whose bills of bygone 
splendor lie with a heavy weight on her con- 
science, if not on her purse ! 

With us the evil has spread high and low. 
Everywhere have the examples given by the 
highest ladies in the land been followed but too 
successfully. 

Every year did dress become more extrava- 
gant, entertainments more costly, expenses of 
every kind more considerable. Lower and lower 
became the tone of society, its good breeding, 
its delicacy. More and more were Tiionde and 
demimonde associated in newspaper accounts of 
fashionable doings, in scandalous gossip, on 
racecourses, in premieres representations, in 
imitation of each other's costumes, mobiliers 
and slang. 

Living beyond one's means became habitual — 
almost necessary — for every one to keep up 
with, if not to go beyond, every one else. 

What the result of all this has been we now 



PREFACE. 25 

see in the wreck of our prosperity, in the down- 
fall of all that seemed brightest and highest. 

Deeply and fearfully impressed by what my 
own country has incurred and is suffering, I 
cannot help feeling sorrowful when I see in 
England signs of our besetting sins appearing 
also. Paint and chignons, slang and vaude- 
villes, knowing " Anonymas " by name, and 
reading doubtfully moral novels, are in them- 
selves small oiTences, although not many years 
ago they would have appeared very heinous 
ones, yet they are quick and tempting convey- 
ances on a very dangerous highroad. 

I would that all Englishwomen knew how they 
are looked up to from abroad — what a high 
opinion, what honor and reverence we foreigners 
have for their principles, their truthfulness, the 
fresh and pure innocence of their daughters, the 
healthy youthfulness of their lovely children. 

May I illustrate this by a short example w^hich 
happened very near me? During the days of 
the aiieictes of 1848, all the houses in Paris were 
being searched for firearms by the mob. The 
one I was living in contained none, as the mas- 
ter of the house repeatedly assured the furious 
and incredulous Republicans. They were going 
to lay violent hands on him, when his wife, an 
English lady, hearing the loud discussion, came 
bravely forward and assured them that no arms 



26 PREFACE. 

were concealed. " Vous (^tes anglaise, nous 
vous croyons ; les anglaises disent toujours la 
v(§rite," was the immediate answer, and the 
rioters quietly left. 

Now, Sir, shall I be accused of unjust criti- 
cism if, loving and admiring your country, as 
these lines will prove, certain new features strike 
me as painful discrepancies in English life? 

Far be it from me to preach the contempt of 
all that can make life lovable and wholesomely 
pleasant. I love nothing better than to see a 
woman nice, neat, elegant, looking her best in 
the prettiest dress that her taste and purse can 
afford, or your bright, fresh young girls fear- 
lessly and perfectly sitting their horses, or 
adorning their houses as pretty {sic\ it is not 
quite grammar, but it is better than if it were ;] 
as care, trouble, and refinement can make them. 

It is the degree beyojid that which to us has 
proved so fatal, and that I would our example 
could warn you from, as a small repayment for 
your hospitality and friendliness to us in our 
days of trouble. 

May Englishwomen accept this in a kindly 
spirit as a new-years wish from 

French Lady. 

Dec. 29. 

That, then, is the substance of what I would 



PREFACE. 27 

fain say convincingly, if it might be, to my girl 
friends ; at all events, with certainty in my own 
mind that I was thus far a safe guide to them. 

For other and older readers it is needful I 
should write a few words more, respecting what 
opportunity I have had to judge, or right I have 
to speak, of such things ; for, indeed, too much 
of what I have said about women has been said in 
faith only. A wise and lovely English lady told 
me, when " Sesame and Lilies " first appeared, 
that she was sure the Sesame would be useful, 
but that in the Lilies I had been writing of what 
I knew nothing about. Which was in a meas- 
ure too true, and also that it is more partial than 
my writings are usually ; for as EUesmere spoke 

his speech on the intervention, not indeed 

otherwise than he felt, but yet altogether for the 
sake of Gretchen, so I wrote the Lilies to please 
one girl ; and were it not for what I remember 
of her, and of few besides, should now perhaps 
recast some of the sentences in the Lilies in a 
very different tone : for as years have gone by, 
it has chanced to me, untowardly in some re- 
spects, fortunately in others (because it enables 
me to read history more clearly), to see the 
utmost evil that is in women, while I have 
had but to believe the utmost good. The best 
women are indeed necessarily the most difficult 
to know; they are recognized chiefly in the 



28 PREFACE. 

happiness of their husbands and the nobleness 
of their children ; they are only to be divined, 
not discerned, by the stranger; and, sometimes, 
seem almost helpless except in their homes ; yet 
without the help of one of them,i to whom this 
book is dedicated, the day would probably have 
come before now, when I should have written 
and thought no more. 

On the other hand, the fashion of the time 
renders whatever is forward, coarse or senseless, 
in feminine nature, too palpable to all men : — 
the weak picturesqucness of my earlier writings 
brought me acquainted with much of their emp- 
tiest enthusiasm ; and the chances of later life 
gave me opportunities of watching women in 
states of degradation and vindictiveness which 
opened to me the gloomiest secrets of Greek and 
Syrian tragedy. I have seen them betray their 
household charities to lust, their pledged love 
to devotion ; I have seen mothers dutiful to their 
children, as Medea; and children dutiful to 
their parents, as the daughter of Herodias : but 
my trust is still unmoved in the preciousness of 
the natures that are so fatal in their error, and 
I leave the words of the Lilies unchanged ; 
believing, yet, that no man ever lived a right 
life who had not been chastened by a woman's 



PREFACE. 29 

love, strengthened by her courage, and guided 
by her discretion. 

What I might myself have been, so helped, I 
rarely indulge in the idleness of thinking ; but 
what I am, since I take on me the function of a 
teacher, it is well that the reader should know, 
as far as I can tell him. 

Not an unjust person ; not an unkind one ; 
not a false one ; a lover of order, labor, and 
peace. That, it seems to me, is enough to give 
me right to say all I care to say on ethical sub- 
jects : more, I could only tell definitely through 
details of autobiography such as none but pros- 
perous and (in the simple sense of the word) 
faultless, lives could justify; — and mine has 
been neither. Yet, if any one, skilled in read- 
ing the torn manuscripts of the human soul, 
cares for more intimate knowledge of me, he 
may have it by knowing with what persons in 
past history I have most sympathy. 

I will name three. 

In all that is strongest and deepest in me, — 
that fits me for my work, and gives light or 
shadow to my being, I have sympathy with 
Guido Guinicelli. 

In my constant natural temper, and thoughts 
of things and of people, with Marmontel. 

In my enforced and accidental temper, and 
thoughts of things and of people, with Dean 
Swift. 



30 PREFACE. 

Any one who can understand the natures of 
those three men, can understand mine ; and 
having said so much, I am content to leave both 
life and work to be remembered or forgotten, as 
their uses may deserve. 

Denmark Hill, 
ist January, 1871. 



PREFACE. — FIRST EDITION. 



A PASSAGE in the 95th page of this book, 
referring to Alpine travellers, will fall harshly 
on the reader's ear since it has been sorrowfully 
enforced by the deaths on Mont Cervin. I leave 
it, nevertheless, as it stood, for 1 do not now 
write unadvisedly, and think it wrong to cancel 
what has once been thoughtfully said ; but it 
must not so remain without a few added words. 

No blame ought to attach to the Alpine tour- 
ist for incurring danger. There is usually suffi- 
cient cause, and real reward, for all difficult work ; 
and even were it otherwise, some experience of 
distinct peril, and the acquirement of habits of 
quick and calm action in its presence, are neces- 
sary elements, at some period of life, in the 
formation of manly character. The blame of 
bribing guides into danger is a singular accu- 
sation, in behalf of a people who have made 
mercenary soldiers of themselves for centuries, 
without any one's thinking of giving their fidel- 
ity better employment : thougli, indeed, the 
piece of work they did at the gate of the Tuile- 
31 



3 2 PRE FA CK. — FIRS T EDITION. 

ries, however useless, was no unwise one ; and 
their Hon of Hawed molasse at Lucerne, worth- 
less in point of art th()uu,h it be, is nevertheless 
a better reward than much pay ; and a better 
ornament to the old town than the Schweizer 
Ilof, or flat new quay, for the promenade of 
those travellers who do not take guides into 
danger. The liritish puhhc are howe\cr, at 
home, so innocent of ever l)u\ing" their felh)w 
creatures' lives, that we may justly expect them 
to be punctilious abroad ! They do not, perhaps, 
often calculate how many souls Hit annually, 
choked in fire-damp and sea-sand, from econom- 
ically watched shafts, and economically manned 
ships ; nor see the fiery ghosts writhe up out of 
every scuttleful of cheap coals ; nor count how 
many threads of girlish life are cut off and 
woven aniuially by i)ainted Fates into breadths 
of ball-dresses ; or soaked away, like rotten 
hemp-fibre, in the inlet of Cocytus which over- 
flows the Cirassmarket where flesh is as grass. 
We need not, it seems to me, loudly blame any 
one for paying a guide to take a brave walk with 
him. Therefore, gentlemen of the Alpine Club, 
as much danger as you care to fixce, by all 
means ; but, if it please you, not so much talk 
of it. The real ground of reiM'chension of 
Alpine climbing is that, with less cause, it ex- 
cites more vanity than any other athletic skill. 



PRE FA CE. — E/A'S T EDITION: 3 3 

A good horseman knows what it has cost to 
make him one; everybody else knows it too, 
and knows that he is one ; he need not ride at a 
fence merely to show his seat. But credit for 
practice in climbing can only be claimed after 
success, which, though perhaps accidental and 
unmerited, must yet be attained at all risks, or 
the shame of defeat borne with no evidence of 
the difficulties encountered. At this particular 
period, also, the. distinction obtainable by first 
conquest of a peak is as tempting to a traveller 
as the discovery of a new element to a chemist, 
or of a new species to a naturalist. Vanity is 
never so keenly excited as by competitions which 
involve cliance ; the course of science is con- 
tinually arrested, and its nomenclature fatally 
confused, by the eagerness of even wise and 
able men to establish their priority in an unim- 
portant discovery, or obtain vested right to a 
syllable in a deformed word ; and many an 
otherwise sensible person will risk his life for 
the sake of a line in future guide-books, to the 

fact that " horn was first ascended by Mr. 

X. in the year ■' ; — never reflecting that of 

all the lines in the page, the one he has thus 
wrought for will be precisely the least interest- 
ing to the reader. 

It is not therefore strange, however much to 
be regretted, that while no gentleman boasts in 



34 PREFACE. — FIRST EDITION. 

other cases of his sagacity or his courage — 
while no good soldier talks of the charge he led, 
nor any good sailor of the helm he held, —every 
man among the Alps seems to lose his senses 
and modesty with the fall of the barometer, and 
returns from his Nephelo-coccygia brandishing 
his ice-axe in everybody's face. Whatever the 
Alpine Club have done, or may yet accomplish, 
is a sincere thirst for mountain knowledge, and 
in happy sense of youthful strength and play of 
animal spirit, they have done, and will do, wisely 
and well ; but whatever they are urged to by 
mere sting of competition and itch of praise, 
they will do, as all vain things must be done for 
ever, foolishly and ill. It is a strange proof of 
that absence of any real national love of science, 
of which I have had occasion to speak in the 
text, that no entire survey of the Alps has yet 
been made by properly qualified men ; and that, 
except of the chain of Chamouni, no accurate 
maps exist, nor any complete geological section 
even of that. But Mr. Reilly's survey of that 
central group, and the generally accurate infor- 
mation collected in the guide-book published by 
the Club, are honorable results of English ad- 
venture ; and it is to be hoped that the contin- 
uance of such work will gradually put an end to 
the vulgar excitement which looked upon the 
granite of the Alps only as an unoccupied adver- 
tisement wall for chalking names upon. 



PREFACE. — FIRST EDITION. 35 

Respecting the means of accomplishing such 
work with least risk, there was a sentence in 
the article of our leading public journal, which 
deserves and requires expansion. 

"Their" (the Alpine Club's) "ropes must 
not break." 

Certainly not ! nor any one else's ropes, if 
they may be rendered unbreakable by honesty 
of make ; seeing that more lives hang by them 
on moving than on motionless seas. The rec- 
ords of the last gale at the Cape may teach us 
that economy in the manufacture of cables is 
not always a matter for exultation ; and, on the 
whole, it might even be well in an honest coun- 
try, sending out, and up and down, various lines 
east and west, that no thing ^\\Qv\Ci break ; banks, 
— words, — nor dredging tackle. 

Granting, however, such praise and such 
sphere of exertion as we thus justly may, to 
the spirit of adventure, there is one consequence 
of it, coming directly under my own cognizance, 
of which I cannot but speak with utter regret, — 
the loss, namely, of all real understanding of the 
character and beauty of Switzerland, by the 
country's being now regarded as half watering- 
place, half gymnasium. It is indeed true that 
under the influence of pride which gives poi- 
gnancy to the sensations which others cannot 
share with us (and a not unjustifiable zest to the 



36 PREFACE. — FIRST EDITION. 

pleasure which we have worked for), an ordinary 
traveller will usually observe and enjoy more on 
a difficult excursion than on an easy one ; and 
more in objects to which he is unaccustomed 
than in those with which he is familiar. He 
will notice with extreme interest that snow is 
white on the top of a hill in June, though he 
would have attached little importance to the 
same peculiarity in a wreath at the bottom of a 
hill in January. He will generally find more to 
admire in a cloud under his feet, than in one 
over his head ; and, oppressed by the monotony 
of a sky which is prevalently blue, will derive 
extraordinary satisfaction from its approximation 
to black. Add to such grounds of delight the 
aid given to the effect of whatever is impressive 
in the scenery of the high Alps, by the absence 
of ludicrous or degrading concomitants ; and it 
ceases to be surprising that Alpine excursionists 
should be greatly pleased, or that they should 
attribute their pleasure to some true and in- 
creased apprehension of the nobleness of nat- 
ural scenery. But no impression can be more 
false. The real beauty of the Alps is to be 
seen, and seen only, where all may see it, the 
child, the cripple, and the man of gray hairs. 
There is more true loveliness in a single glade 
of pasture shadowed by pine, or gleam of rocky 
brook, or inlet of unsullied lake among the 



PRE FA CE. — FIRS T EDITION. 3 / 

lower Bernese and Savoyard hills, than in 
the entire field of jagged gneiss which crests 
the central ridge from the Shreckhorn to the 
Viso. The valley of Cluse, through which un- 
happy travellers consent now to be invoiced, 
packed in baskets like fish, so only that they 
may cheaply reach, in the feverous haste which 
has become the law of their being, the glen of 
Chamouni whose every lovely foreground rock 
has now been broken up to build hotels for 
them, contains more beauty in half a league of 
it, than the entire valley they have devastated, 
and turned into a casino, did in its uninjured 
pride \ and that passage of the Jura by Olten 
(between Basle and Lucerne), which is by the 
modern tourist triumphantly effected through a 
tunnel in ten minutes, between two piggish 
trumpet grunts proclamatory of the ecstatic 
transit, used to show from every turn and sweep 
of its winding ascent, up which one sauntered, 
gathering wild-flowers, for half a happy day, 
diviner aspects of the distant Alps than ever 
were achieved by toil of limb, or won by risk of 
life. 

There is indeed a healthy enjoyment both in 
engineers' work, and in school-boy's play ; the 
making and mending of roads has its true en- 
thusiasms, and I have still pleasure enough in 
mere scrambling to wonder not a little at the 



3 8 PREFA CE. — F//^S T EDITION. 

supreme gravity witli which apes exercise their 
superior powers in that kind, as if profitless to 
them. Ikit neitlicr macadamization, nor tunnel- 
ling, nor rope ladders, will ever enable one 
human creature to understand the pleasure in 
natural scenery felt by Theocritus or Virgil; and 
1 believe the athletic health of our schoolboys 
might be made perfectly consistent with a spirit 
of more courtesy and reverence, both for men 
and things, than is recognizable in the behavior 
of modern youth. Some year or two back, I 
was staying at the Montanvert to paint Alpine 
roses, and went every day to watch the budding 
of a favorite bed, which was rounding into fault- 
less bloom beneath a cirque of rock, high enough, 
as I hoped, and close enough, to guard it from 
rude eyes and plucking hands. But, 

" Tra erto e piano era un sentiero ghembo, 
Che ne condusse in fianco del a lacca," 

and on the day it reached the fulness of its 
rubied 'iwQ, I was standing near when it was dis- 
covered by a forager on the flanks of a travelling 
school of English and German lads. He shouted 
to his companions, and they swooped down upon 
it ; threw themselves into it, rolled over and 
over in it, shrieked, hallooed, and fought in it, 
trampled it down, and tore it up by the roots; 



FREFA CE. — 2'IRS 'I ' EDITION. 3 9 

breathless at last with rapture of ravage, they 
fixed the brightest of the remnant blossoms of 
it in their caps, and went on their way rejoicing. 
They left me much to think upon ; partly re- 
specting the essential power of the beauty which 
could so excite them, and partly respecting the 
character of the youth which could only be 
excited to destroy. But the incident was a per- 
fect type of that irreverence for natural beauty 
with respect to which I said in the text, at the 
place already indicated, " You make railroads 
of the aisles of the cathedrals of the earth, and 
eat off their altars." For indeed all true lovers 
of natural beauty hold it in reverence so deep, 
that they would as soon think of climbing the 
pillars of the choir lieauvais for a gymnastic 
exercise, as of making a play-ground of Alpine 
snow : and they would not risk one hour of their 
joy among the hill meadows on a May morning, 
for the fame or fortune of having stood on every 
pinnacle of the silver temple, and beheld the 
kingdoms of the world from it. Love of excite- 
ment is so far from being love of beauty, that it 
ends always in a joy in its exact reverse ; joy in 
destruction, — as of my poor roses, — or in actual 
details of death ; until, in the literature of the 
day, " nothing is too dreadful, or too trivial, for 
the greed of the public." ^ And in politics, 

* Pall Mall Gazette, August istli, article on the Forward 
murders. 



40 rKEFACK. — FJKST J'J)IT10.V. 

apathy, iircvcrcncr, aiul lust ol luxiiiy i;o hand 
in hand, until the best SDlcmni/ation which can 
l)C CDUccivi'd U)i- tlic greatest cxcnl iu modern 
European histoiy, (he ciowniuL; ol I'lorenco 
capital ol Italy, is llu' accursed and ill-oiuened 
i'olly ot" casting; iK)\vn hei" old walls, and sur- 
roundiuL; her with a " l)oule\ard ; " and this at 
the very time when every stone ol" her ancient 
cities is nioie precit)us to her than the <;ems of 
a I'lim breastplate, and when every nerve ol her 
heart and brain should have been strained to 
redeem her guilt and hiltil her iVeedom. It is 
not by makins;' roads roimd Morence, but thront^h 
Calabria, thai she should be^in hei' Roman 
causiwv.iy woik a<;ain ; and her fate points her 
march, not on boule\ai(ls b\' /Vriio, but waist- 
dei'p in the laL;()ons at Wmhcc. Not yet, in- 
deed, bul live years of patience and tliscipline 
of hei- youth wduUI accomplish her jiower, and 
sweep the maitello towers iVom the clilVs of 
Veroiui, and the rampaits iVoin the marsh ()f 
Mcstre. lUit she will not teach her youth that 
discipline ou boulexaids. 

Strange, that while we bt)th, French and ICng- 
lish, can give lessons in war, we oidy corrupt 
other nations w hen they imitate either our pleas- 
ures or our industries. VVe l*'nglish, had we 
loved Swil/erland indeed, shouhl have striven 
to elevate, but not to disturii, the simplicity ot" 



PKEFA CE. — /'//v'.V /■ EI) J 770 N. 4 1 

her people, by teaching them the sacredness of 
their fields and waters, the honor of their pas- 
toral and burgher life, and the fellowship in 
glory of the gray turreted walls round their 
ancient cities, with their cottages in their fair 
groups by the forest and lake. Beautiful, in- 
deed, upon the mountains, had been the feet of 
any who had si)oken peace to their children ; — 
who had taught those princely peasants to re- 
member their lineage, and their league with the 
rocks of the field ; that so they might keep their 
mountain waters pure, and their mountain paths 
peaceful, and their traditions of domestic life 
holy. We have taught them (incapable by cir- 
cumstances and position of ever becoming a 
great commercial nation) all the foulness of the 
modern lust of wealth, without its practical 
intelligences ; and we have developed exactly 
the weakness of their temperament by which 
they are liable to meanest ruin. Of the ancient 
architecture and most expressive beauty of their 
country there is now little vestige left ; and it is 
one of the few reasons which console me for the 
advance of life, that I am old enough to remem- 
ber the time when the sweet waves of the Reuss 
and Limmat (now foul with the refuse of manu- 
facture) were as crystalline as the heaven above 
them, when her pictured bridges and embattled 
towers ran unbroken round Lucerne ; when the 



42 PKKFACE. — FJKST EDITION. 

Rhone flowed in deep-i;ieen, softly diviiling cur- 
rents round the wooilen nuuparts of C^.eneva ; 
and when from tlie nuirble roof of the western 
vault of Milan, I could watch the Rose of Italy 
flush in the first morning light, before a human 
foot had sullied its summit, or the reddening 
ilawn on its rocks taken shadow^ of sadness from 
the crimson which long ago stained the ripples 
of Otterburn. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Of Kings' Treasuries 45 

II. Of Queens' Gardens 123 

II. Of the Mystery of Life .... 175 



m '^iuQs' gvjeasxxicxjes. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 



LECTURE I. 
OF kings' treasuries. 

You shall each have a cake of sesame, — and ten pound. 
LUCIAN : The Fisherman. 

I. My first duty this evening is to ask your 
pardon for the ambiguity of title under which 
the subject of lecture has been announced ; for 
indeed I am not going to talk of kings, known 
as regnant, nor of treasuries, understood to con- 
tain wealth, but of quite another order of royalty 
and another material of riches than those usually 
acknowledged. I had even intended to ask 
your attention for a little while on trust, and (as 
sometimes one contrives, in taking a friend to 
see a favorite piece of scenery) to hide what 
I wanted most to show, with such imperfect 
cunning as I might, until we unexpectedly' 
reached the best point of view by winding 



46 SESAME AND LILIES. 

paths. But — and as also I have heard it 
said, by men practised in public address, that 
hearers are never so much fatigued as by the 
endeavor to follow a speaker who gives them 
no clew to his purpose — I will take the slight 
mask off at once, and tell you plainly that I 
want to speak to you about the treasures hidden 
in books ; and about the way we find them, and 
the way we lose them. A grave subject, you 
will say, and a wide one ! Yes ; so wide that I 
shall make no effort to touch the compass of it. 
I will try only to bring before you a few simple 
thoughts about reading, which press themselves 
upon me every day more deeply, as I watch the 
course of the public mind with respect to our 
daily enlarging means of education, and the 
answeringly wider spreading on the levels, of 
the irrigation of literature. 

2. It happens that I have practically some 
connection with schools for different classes of 
youth ; and I receive many letters from parents 
respecting the education of their children. In 
the mass of these letters I am always struck by 
the precedence which the idea of a " position in 
life" takes above all other thoughts in the 
parents' — more especially in the mothers' — 
minds. " The education befitting such and such 
a station in life,'''' — this is the phrase, this the 
object, always. They never seek, as far as I 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 4/ 

can make out, an education good in itself; even 
the conception of abstract Tightness in training 
rarely seems reached by the writers. But an 
education " which shall keep a good coat on my 
son's back ; which shall enable him to ring with 
confidence the visitors' bell at double-belled 
doors ; which shall result ultimately in the 
establishment of a double-belled door to his 
own house, — in a word, which shall lead to 
advancement in life, — this we pray for on bent 
knees ; and this is all we pray for." It never 
seems to occur to the parents that there may be 
an education which in itself is advancement in 
Life ; that any other than that may perhaps be 
advancement in Death ; and that this essential 
education might be more easily got, or given, 
than they fancy, if they set about it in the right 
way, while it is for no price and by no favor to 
be got, if they set about it in the wrong. 

3. Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent 
and effective in the mind of this busiest of 
countries, I suppose the first — at least that 
which is confessed with the greatest frankness, 
and put forward as the fittest stimulus to youthful 
exertion — is this of "Advancement in life." 
May I ask you to consider with me what this 
idea practically includes, and what it should 
include? 

Practically, then, at present, "advancement 



48 SESAME AND LILIES. 

in life" means, becoming conspicuous in life, 
— obtaining a position which shall be ac- 
knowledged by others to be respectable or 
honorable. We do not understand by this 
advancement, in general, the mere making of 
money, but the being known to have made it ; 
not the accomplishment of any great aim, but 
the being seen to have accomplished it. In 
a word, we mean the gratification of our thirst 
for applause. That thirst, if the last infirmity 
of noble minds, is also the first infirmity of 
weak ones, and on the whole, the strongest 
impulsive influence of average humanity. The 
greatest eiTorts of the race have always been 
traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest 
catastrophes to the love of pleasure. 

4. I am not about Xo attack or defend this 
impulse. I want you only to feel how it lies 
at the root of effort, especially of all modern 
effort. It is the gratification of vanity which 
is, with us, the stimulus of toil and balm of 
repose. So closely does it touch the very 
springs of life that the wounding of our vanity 
is always spoken of (and truly) as in its measure 
mortal ', we call it " mortification," using the 
same expression which we should apply to a 
gangrenous and incurable bodily hurt. And 
although a few of us may be physicians enough 
to recognize the various eifect of this passion 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 49 

upon health and energy, I believe most honest 
men know, and would at once acknowledge, its 
leading power with them as a motive. The sea- 
man does not commonly desire to be made 
captain only because he knows he can manage 
the ship better than any other sailor on board ; 
he wants to be made captain that he may be 
called Q-2C^X2i\VL. The clergyman does not usually 
want to be made a bishop only because he 
believes that no other hand can, as firmly as his, 
direct the diocese through its difficulties ; he 
wants to be made bishop primarily that he may 
be called " My Lord." And a prince does not 
usually desire to enlarge, or a subject to gain, a 
kingdom because he believes that no one else 
can as well serve the State upon its throne, but 
briefly, because he wishes to be addressed as 
" Your Majesty" by as many lips as may be 
brought to such utterance. 

5. This, then, being the main idea of " ad- 
vancement in life," the force of it applies for all 
of us, according to our station, particularly to 
that secondary result of such advancement which 
we call "getting into good society." We want 
to get into good society, not that we may have 
it, but that we may be seen in it ; and our notion 
of its goodness depends primarily on its con- 
spicuousness. 

Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment 



50 SESAME AND LILIES. . 

to put what I fear you may think an impertinent 
question? I never can go on with an address 
unless I feel or know that my audience are either 
with me or against me. I do not much care 
which, in beginning ; but I must know where 
they are. And I would fain find out at this 
instant whether you think I am putting the 
motives of popular action too low. I am re- 
solved to-night to state them low enough to be 
admitted as probable; for whenever, in my 
writings on Political Economy, I assume that 
a little honesty, or generosity, — or what used 
to be called "virtue," — maybe calculated upon 
as a human motive of action, people always 
answer me, saying, " You must not calculate on 
that; that is not in human nature. You must 
not assume anything to be common to men but 
acquisitiveness and jealousy; no other feeling 
ever has influence on them, except accidentally, 
and in matters out of the way of business.'" I 
begin, accordingly, to-night low in the scale of 
motives ; but I must know if you think me right 
in doing so. Therefore, let me ask those who 
admit the love of praise to be usually the strong- 
est motive in men's minds in seeking advance- 
ment, and the honest desire of doing any kind 
of duty to be an entirely secondary one, to hold 
up their hands. (^Abont a dozen hands held 
up^ — the audience, partly^ not being sure the 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 5 I 

lecturer is serious, and partly, shy of expressing 
opinion.') I am quite serious, — I really do want 
to know what you think ; however, I can judge 
by putting the reverse question. Will those 
who think that duty is generally the first, and 
love of praise the second, motive, hold up their 
hands? {One hand reported to have been held 
up, behiiid the lecturer.) Very good ; I see you 
are with me, and that you think I have not 
begun too near the ground. Now, without 
teasing you by putting farther question, I venture 
to assume that you will admit duty as at least a 
secondary or tertiary motive. You think that 
the desire of doing something useful, or obtain- 
ing some real good, is indeed an existent col- 
lateral idea, though a secondary one, in most 
men's desire of advancement. You will grant 
that moderately honest men desire place and 
office, at least in some measure, for the sake of 
beneficent power, and would wish to associate 
rather with sensible and well-informed persons 
than with fools and ignorant persons, whether 
they are seen in the company of the sensible 
ones or not. And finally, without being troubled 
by repetition of any common truisms about the 
preciousness of friends and the influence of com- 
panions, you will admit, doubtless, that accord- 
ing to the sincerity of our desire that our friends 
may be true, and our companions wise, and in 



$2 SESAME AND LILIES. 

proportion to the earnestness and discretion with 
which we choose both, will be the general 
chances of our happiness and usefulness. 

6. But granting that we had both the will and 
the sense to choose our friends well, how few of 
us have the power ; or at least, how limited for 
most is the sphere of choice ! Nearly all our 
associations are determined by chance or neces- 
sity, and restricted within a narrow circle. We 
cannot know whom we would, and those whom we 
know we cannot have at our side when we most 
need them. All the higher circles of human in- 
telligence are, to those beneath, only momenta- 
rily and partially open. We may by good fortune 
obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the 
sound of his voice, or put a question to a man 
of science, and be answered good-humoredly. 
We may intrude ten minutes' talk on a cabinet 
minister, answered probably with words worse 
than silence, being deceptive, or snatch, once 
or twice in our lives, the privilege of throwing a 
bouquet in the path of a princess, or arresting 
the kind glance of a queen. And yet these 
momentary chances we covet, and spend our 
years and passions and powers in pursuit of 
little more than these ; w^hile, meantime, there 
is a society continually open to us of people who 
will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our 
rank or occupation, — talk to us in the best 



OF KINGS' rREASURIES. 53 

words they can choose, and of the things nearest 
their hearts. And this society, because it is so 
numerous and so gentle, and can be kept wait- 
ing round us all day long (kings and statesmen 
lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but 
to gain it), in tiiose plainly furnished and nar- 
row anterooms, our bookcase shelves, — we 
make no account of that company, perhaps never 
listen to a word they would say, all day long. 

7. You may tell me perhaps, or think within 
yourselves, that the apathy with which we re- 
gard this company of the noljle, who are praying 
us to listen to them, and the passion with which 
we pursue the company probably of the ignoble, 
wlio despise us, or who have nothing to teach 
us, are grounded in this, — that we can see the 
faces of the living men ; and it is themselves, 
and not their sayings, with which we desire to 
become familiar. But it is not so. Suppose 
you never were to see their faces ; suppose you 
could be put behind a screen in the statesman's 
cabinet or the prince's chamber, would you not 
be glad to listen to their words, though you were 
forljidden to advance beyond the screen? And 
when the screen is only a little less, folded in 
two instead of four, and you can be hidden 
behind the cover of the two boards that bind a 
book, and listen all day long, not to the casual 
talk, but to the studied, determined, chosen 



54 SESAAfF. AXD IJLTRS. 

addresses of the wisest of men, — this station 
of audience and honorable j)rivy council you 
despise ! 

8. lUit perhaps you will say that it is because 
the living people talk of things that are passing, 
and are of immediate interest to you, that you 
desire to hear them. Nay, that cannot be so ; 
for the living people will themselves tell you 
about passing matters much lietter in their 
writings than in their careless talk. But I admit 
that this motive does influence you, so far as you 
prefer those rapid and ephemeral writings to 
slow and enduring writings, — books, properly 
so-called. P\>r all books are divisible into two 
classes, — the books of the hour, and the books 
of all time. Mark this distinction; it is not one 
of quality only. It is not merely the bad book 
that does not last, and the good one that does ; 
it is a distinction of species. There are good 
books tor the hour, and good ones tor all time; 
bail books for the hour, and bad ones for all 
time. I must detine the two kinds before I go 
farther, 

9. The good book of the hour, then. — I do 
not speak of the bad ones, — is simply the useful 
or pleasant talk of some persoii whom you can- 
not otherwise converse with, jninted for you. 
Very useful often, telling you what you need to 
know ; very pleasant often, as a sensible friend's 



OF KINGS' TRKASURIES. 55 

present talk would be. These l>rig}it accounts 
of travels ; good-humored and witty discussions 
of question ; lively or pathetic story-telling in 
the form of novel ; firm fact-telling, by the real 
agents concerned in the events of passing his- 
tory — all these books of the hour, multiplying 
among us as education becomes more general, 
are a peculiar possession of the present age. 
We ought to be entirely thankful for them, and 
entirely ashamed of ourselves if we make no 
good use of them. But we make the worst pos- 
sible use if we allow them to usurp the place of 
true books ; for strictly speaking, they are not 
books at all, but merely letters or newspapers 
in good print. Our friend's letter may be de- 
lightful or necessary to-day, — whether worth 
keeping or not, is to be considered. The news- 
paper may be entirely proper at breakfast-time, 
but assuredly it is not reading for all day ; so, 
though bound up in a volume, the long letter 
which gives you so pleasant an account of the 
inns and roads and weather last year at such a 
place, or which tells you that amusing story, or 
gives you the real circumstances of such and 
such events, however valuable for occasional 
reference, may not be in the real sense of the 
word a " book" at all, nor in the real sense to 
bo " read." A book is essentially not a talked 
thing, but a written thing, and written not with 



$6 SKSAM/-: A.Vn LILIES. 

a view of more coinfinuAkwtioii. but of i>onna- 
uonce. Tlie book of talk is printed only be- 
cause its author cannot speak to thousands of 
people at once ; if he could he would, — the 
volume is mere inuItiMication of his voice. Vou 
cannot talk to your friend in India ; if you could, 
you would. You write instead ; that is mere 
lOftvewiHce of voice. lUit a book is written, not 
to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it 
merely, but to perpetuate it. The author has 
something- to say which he perceives to be true 
and useful, or helptully beautitul. So tar as 
he knows, no one has yet said it : so far as he 
knows, no one else can say it. He is bound to 
say it clearly and melodiously, if he may ; clearly, 
at all events. In the sum of his lite he finds this 
to be the thing or group of things manifest to 
him. — this the piece of true knowledge or sight 
which his share of sunshine and earth has per- 
mitted him to seize. He would fain set it down 
forever, engrave it on rock if he could, saying, 
" This is the best of me ; for the rest, I ate and 
drank and slept, loved and hated like another, 
^[y life was as the vapor, and is not ; but this I 
saw and knew. — this, if anything of mine, is 
worth your memory." That is his " writing ; '' it 
is in his small human way, and with whatever 
degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscrip- 
tion or scripture.- That is a ** book." 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 57 

10. I\-rhaps you think no books were ever so 
written ? 

But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in 
honesty or at all in kindness, or do you think 
there is never any honesty or benevolence in 
wise people? None of us, I hope, are so un- 
happy as to think that. Well, whatever bit of 
a wise man's work is honestly and benevolently 
done, that bit is his book, or his piece of art.^ 
It is mixed always with evil fragments, — ill- 
done, redundant, affected work. But if you read 
rightly, you will easily discover the true bits, 
and those are the book. 

1 1 . Now, books of this kind have been written 
in all ages by their greatest men, — by great 
readers, great statesmen, and great thinkers. 
These are all at your choice ; and Life is short. 
You have heard as much before ; yet have you 
measured and mapped out this short life and its 
possibilities? Do you know, if you read this, 
that you cannot read that ; that what you lose 
to-day you cannot gain to-morrow? Will you 
go and gossip with your housemaid or your 
stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and 
kings; or flatter yourselves that it is with any 
worthy consciousness of your own claims to 
respect that you jostle with the hungry and com- 

1 Note this sentence carefully, and compare the " Queen of 
the Air," § 106. 



58 SESAMh AND LILIES. 

mon crowd for cntrtc here, and audience there, 
when all the while this eternal court, is open to 
you, with its society, wide as the world, multi- 
tudinous as its days, — the chosen and the 
mi_<i;hty of every i)lace and time? Into that you 
may enter always ; in that you may take fellow- 
ship and rank according to your wish; from 
that, once entered into it, you can never be an 
outcast but by your own fault ; by your aristoc- 
racy of companionship there, your own inherent 
aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the 
motives with which you strive to take high place 
in the society ot the living, measured, as to all 
the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the 
l)lace you desire to take in this company of the 
dead. 

12. "The place you desire," and the place 
you fit yourself for, I must also say, because, 
observe, this court of the past differs from all 
living aristocracy in this, — it is open to labor 
and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth 
will bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive, 
the guardian of those Elysian gates. In the 
deep sense, no vile or vulgar person ever enters 
there. At the porti(^res of that silent Faubourg 
St. Germain, there is *but brief question: " Do 
you deserve to enter? Pass. Do you ask to 
be the companion of nobles? Make yourself 
noble, and you shall be. Do you long for the 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 59 

conversation of the wise ? Learn to understand 
it, and you shall hear it. But on other terms ? — 
No. If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop 
to you. The living lord may assume courtesy, 
the living philosopher explain his thought to 
you with considerate pain ; but here we neither 
feign nor interpret. You must rise to the level 
of our thoughts if you w'ould be gladdened by 
them, and share our feelings if you would recog- 
nize our presence." 

13. This, then, is what you have to do, and I 
admit that it is much. You must, in a word, 
love these people, if you are to be among them. 
No ambition is of any use. They scorn your 
ambition. You must love them, and show your 
love in these two following ways : — 

i^d) First, by a true desire to be taught by 
them, and to enter into their thoughts. To 
enter into theirs, observe, not to find your own 
expressed by them. If the person who wrote 
the book is not wiser than you, you need not 
read it ; if he be, he will think differently from 
you in many respects. 

Very ready we are to say of a book, " How 
good this is, — thafs exactly what I think!" 
But the right feeling is, '' How strange that is ! 
I never thought of that before, and yet I see it 
is true ; or if I do not now, I hope I shall some 
day." But whether thus submissively or not, 



60 SESAME AND LILIES. 

at least be sure that you go to the author to get 
at /lis meaning, not to find yours. Judge it 
afterwards if you think yourself qualified to do 
so ; but ascertain it first. And be sure also, 
if the author is worth anything, that you will not 
get at his meaning all at once, — nay, that at 
his whole meaning you will not for a long time 
arrive in any wise. Not that he does not say 
what he means, and in strong words too ; but 
he cannot say it all, and what is more strange, 
will not, but in a hiddLMi way and in parables, 
in order that he may be sure you want it. I 
cannot quite see the reason of this, nor analyze 
that cmel reticence in the breasts of wise men 
which makes them always hide their deeper 
thought. They do not give it you by way of 
help, but of reward, and will make themselves 
sure that you deserve it before they allow you 
to reach it. But it is the same with the physical 
type of wisdom, gold. There seems, to you 
and me, no reason why the electric forces of the 
earth should not carry whatever there is of gold 
within it at once to the mountain-tops ; so that 
kings and people might know that all the gold 
they could get was there, and without any 
trouble of digging, or anxiety, or chance, or 
waste of time, cut it away, and coin as much as 
they needed. But Nature does not manage it 
so. She puts it in little fissures in the earth, 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 6l 

nobody knows where. You may dig long and 
find none ; you must dig painfully to find any. 

14. And it is just the same with men's best 
wisdom. When you come to a good book, you 
must ask yourself, "Ami inclined to work as 
an Australian miner would? Are my pickaxes 
and shovels in good order, and am I in good 
trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, 
and my breath good, and my temper?" And 
keeping the figure a little longer, even at cost of 
tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly useful one, 
the metal you are in search of being the author's 
mind or meaning, his words are as the rock 
which you have to crush and smelt in order to 
get at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, 
wit, and learning ; your smelting furnace is 
your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get 
at any good author's meaning without those 
tools and that fire ; often you will need sharpest, 
finest chiselling and patientest fussing before 
you can gather one grain of the metal. 

15. And, therefore, first of all, I tell you 
earnestly and authoritatively (I know I am right 
in this) you must get into the habit of looking 
intensely at words, and assuring yourself of 
their meaning, syllable by syllable — nay, letter 
by letter. For though it is only by reason of 
the opposition of letters in the function of signs 
to sounds in the function of signs, that the study 



62 SESAME AND LILIES. 

of books is called " literature," and that a man 
versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, 
a man of letters instead of a man of books or of 
words, you may yet connect with that accidental 
nomenclature this real fact, — that you might 
read all the books in the British Museum (if you 
could live long enough) and remain an utterly 
*' illiterate," uneducated person ; but that if you 
read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, 
— that is to say, with real accuracy, — you are 
forevermore in some measure an educated per- 
son. The entire difference between education 
and non-education (as regards the merely in- 
tellectual part of it) consists in this accuracy. 
A well-educated gentleman may not know many 
languages, may not be able to speak any but his 
own, may have read very few books. But what- 
ever language he knows, he knows precisely ; 
whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces 
rightly. Above all, he is learned in \X\q. peerage 
of words, knows the words of true descent and 
ancient blood, at a glance, from words of 
modern canaille, remembers all their ancestry, 
their intermarriages, distant relationships, and 
the extent to which they were admitted, and 
offices they held, among the national noblesse of 
words at any time and in any country. But an 
uneducated person may know, by memory, 
many languages, and talk them all, and yet 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 6$ 

truly know not a word of any, — not a word even 
of his own. An ordinarily clever and sensible 
seaman will be able to make his way ashore at 
most ports, yet he has only to speak a sentence 
of any language to be known for an illiterate 
person ; so also the accent, or turn of expression 
of a single sentence, will at once mark a scholar. 
And this is so strongly felt, so conclusively 
admitted, by educated persons, that a false 
accent or a mistaken syllable is enough, in the 
parliament of any civilized nation, to assign to a 
man a certain degree of inferior standing forever. 
1 6. And this is right ; but it is a pity that the 
accuracy insisted on is not greater, and required 
to a serious purpose. It is right that a false 
Latin quantity should excite a smile in the 
House of Commons ; but it is wrong that a false 
English meam'j/^^ should not excite a frown there. 
Let the accent of words be watched, and closely ; 
let their meaning be watched more closely still, 
and fewer will do the work. A few words, well 
chosen and distinguished, will do work that a 
thousand cannot, when every one is acting, 
equivocally, in the function of another. Yes ; 
and words, if they are not watched, will do 
deadly work sometimes. There are masked 
words droning and skulking about us in Europe 
just now (there never were so many, owing to 
the spread of a shallow, blotching, blundering. 



64 SESAME AND LILIES. 

infectious " information," or rather deformation, 
everywhere, and to the teaching of catechisms 
and phrases at schools instead of human mean- 
ings) — there are masked words abroad, I say, 
which nobody understands, but which every- 
body uses, and most people will also fight for, 
live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this 
or that or the other of things dear to them ; for 
such words wear chameleon cloaks, — " ground- 
lion" cloaks, of the color of the ground of any 
man's fancy ; on that ground they lie in wait, 
and rend him with a spring from it. There 
never Avere creatures of prey so mischievous, 
never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners 
so deadly, as these masked words ; they are the 
unjust stewards of all men's ideas. Whatever 
fancy or favorite instinct a man most cherishes, 
he gives to his favorite masked word to take care 
of for him. The word at last comes to have an 
infinite power over him, — you cannot get at 
him but by its ministry. 

17. And in languages so mongrel in breed as 
the English, there is a fatal power of equivoca- 
tion put into men's hands, almost whether they 
will or no, in being able to use Greek or Latin 
words for an idea when they want it to be awful, 
and Saxon or otherwise common words when 
they want it to be vulgar. What a singular and 
salutary effect, for instance, would be produced 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 65 

■? 
on the minds of people who are in the habit of 
taking the form of the " Word " they live by for 
the power of which that Word tells them, if we 
always either retained, or refused, the Greek 
form " biblos," or " biblion," as the right ex- 
pression for " book," instead of employing it 
only in the one instance in which we wish to 
give dignity to the idea, and translating it into 
English everywhere else. How wholesome it 
would be for many simple persons if in such 
places (for instance) as Acts xix. 19, we retained 
the Greek expression instead of translating it, 
and they had to read: "Many of them also 
which used curious arts brought their Bibles 
together, and burned them before all men ; and 
they counted the price of them, and found it 
fifty thousand pieces of silver " ! Or if, on the 
other hand, we translated where we retain it, 
and always spoke of " the Holy Book," instead 
of " Holy Bible," it might come into more heads 
than it does at present that the Word of God, 
by which the heavens were of old, and by which 
they are now kept in store, ^ cannot be made a 
present of to anybody in morocco binding, nor 
sown on any wayside by help either of steam 
plough or steam press, but is nevertheless being 
offered to us daily, and by us with contumely 

1 2 Peter iii. 5-7. 



66 SESAME AND LILIES. 

» 
refused, and sown in us daily, and by us, as 
instantly as may be, choked. 

i8. So, again, consider what effect has been 
produced on the English vulgar mind by the use 
of the sonorous Latin form " damno,^' in trans- 
lating the Greek xaTuitoU'M, when people chari- 
tably wish to make it forcible ; and the substitu- 
tion of the temperate " condemn " for it, when 
they choose to keep it gentle ; and what notable 
sermons have been preached by illiterate clergy- 
men on *' He that believeth not shall be damned," 
though they would shrink with horror from trans- 
lating Heb. xi. 7, " The saving of his house, by 
which he damned the world," or John viii. lo- 
II, " Woman, hath no man damned thee? She 
saith. No man. Lord. Jesus answered her, 
Neither do I damn thfee ; go, and sin no more." 
And divisions in the mind of Europe, which 
have cost seas of blood, and in the defence of 
which the noblest souls of men have been cast 
away in frantic desolation, countless as forest- 
leaves, — though, in the heart of them, founded 
on deeper causes, — have nevertheless been ren- 
dered practically possible mainly by the Euro- 
pean adoption of the Greek word for a public 
meeting, " ecclesia," to give peculiar respecta- 
bility to such meetings, when held for religious 
purposes and other collateral equivocations, such 
as the vulgar English one of using the word 
*' priest" as a contraction for " presbyter." 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 6/ 

19. Now, in order to deal with words rightly, 
this is the habit you must form. Nearly every 
word in your language has been first a word of 
some other language, — of Saxon, German, 
French, Latin, or Greek ; (not to speak of East- 
ern and primitive dialects). And many words 
have been all these ; that is to say, have been 
Greek first, Latin next, French or German next, 
and English last, — undergoing a certain change 
of sense and use on the lips of each nation, but 
retaining a deep vital meaning, which all good 
scholars feel in employing them, even at this day. 
If you do not know the Greek alphabet, learn it. 
Young or old, girl or boy, whoever you may be, 
if you think of reading seriously (which, of 
course, implies that you have some leisure at com- 
mand) , learn your Greek alphabet ; then get good 
dictionaries of all these languages, and whenever 
you are in doubt about a word, hunt it down 
patiently. Read Max Miiller's lectures thor- 
oughly, to begin with ; and after that, never let 
a word escape you that looks suspicious. It is 
severe work ; but you will find it, even at first, 
interesting, and at last, endlessly amusing. 
And the general gain to your character in power 
and precision will be quite incalculable. 

Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying 
to know, Greek or Latin or French. It takes a 
whole life to learn any language perfectly. But 



68 SESAME AND LILIES. 

you can easily ascertain the meanings through 
which the EngHsh word has passed, and those 
which in a good writer's work it must still bear. 
20. And now, merely for example's sake, I 
will, with your permission, read a few lines of a 
true book with you carefully, and see what will 
come out of them. I will take a book perfectly 
known to you all. No English words are more 
familiar to us, yet few perhaps have been read 
with less sincerity. I will take these few follow- 
ing lines of " Lycidas " : — 

*' Last came, and last did go. 

The pilot of the Galilean lake. 

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain 

(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain). 

He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake: 

* How well could I have spared for thee, young 

swain. 
Enow of such as for their bellies' sake 
Creep and intrude and climb into the fold ! 
Of other care they little reckoning make 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 
And shove away the worthy bidden guest; 
Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to 

hold 
A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else, the least 
That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs ! 
What recks it them? What need they? They are 

sped; 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 69 

And when they list, their lean and flashy songs 
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw. 
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread, 
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 
Daily devours apace, and nothing said.' " 

Let us think over this passage, and examine its 
words. 

First, is it not singular to find Milton assign- 
ing to Saint Peter not only his full episcopal 
function, but the very types of it which Protes- 
tants usually refuse most passionately? His 
"mitred" locks! Milton was no bishop-lover ; 
how comes Saint Peter to be "mitred"? 
" Two massy keys he bore." Is this, then, the 
power of the keys claimed by the bishops of 
Rome, and is it acknowledged here by Milton 
only in a poetical license, for the sake of its 
picturesqueness, that he may get the gleam of 
the golden keys to help his effect? 

Do not think it. Great men do not play 
stage tricks with the doctrines of life and death ; 
only little men do that. Milton means what he 
says, and means it with his might too", — is 
going to put the whole strength of his spirit 
presently into the saying of it. For though not 
a lover of false bishops, he was a lover of true 



70 SESAME AND LILIES. 

ones ; and the Lake-pilot is here, in his thoughts, 
the type and head of true episcopal power. For 
Milton reads that text, " I will give unto thee 
the keys of the kingdom of heaven" quite 
honestly. Puritan though he be, he would not 
blot it out of the book because there have been 
bad bishops, — nay, in order to understand him, 
we must understand that verse first ; it will not 
do to eye it askance, or whisper it under our 
breath, as if it were a weapon of an adverse sect. 
It is a solemn, universal assertion, deeply to be 
kept in mind by all sects. But perliaps we shall 
be better able to reason on it if we go on a little 
farther, and come back to it ; for clearly this 
marked insistence on the power of the true 
episcopate is to make us feel more weightily 
what is to be charged against the false claim- 
ants of episcopate, or generally, against false 
claimants of power and rank in the body of the 
clergy, they who " for their bellies' sake creep 
and intrude and climb into the fold." 

21. Never think Milton uses those three 
words to fill up his verse, as a loose writer 
would. He needs all the three, — specially 
those three, and no more than those, — 
"creep" and ''intrude" and "climb;" no 
other words would or could serve the turn, and 
no more could be added. For they exhaustively 
comprehend the three classes, correspondent to 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. J\ 

the three characters, of men who dishonestly 
seek ecclesiastical power. First, those who 
"creep" into the fold, who do not care for 
office, nor name, but for secret influence, and 
do all things occultly and cunningly, consenting 
to any servility of office or conduct, so only that 
they may intimately discern, and unawares 
direct, the minds of men. Then those who 
" intrude" (thrust, that is) themselves into the 
fold, who by natural insolence of heart and 
stout eloquence of tongue and fearlessly perse- 
verant self-assertion obtain hearing and authority 
with the common crowd. Lastly, those who 
"climb," who, by labor and learning both 
stout and sound, but selfishly exerted in the 
cause of their own ambition, gain high dignities 
and authorities, and become " lords over the 
heritage," though not " ensamples to the flock." 
22. Now go on : — 

"Of other care they little reckoning make 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast. 
Blind mouths — ' ' 

I pause again, for this is a strange expres- 
sion, — a broken metaphor, one might think, 
careless and unscholarly. 

Not so ; its very audacity and pithiness are 
intended to make us look close at the phrase 
and remember it. Those two monosyllables 



72 SESAME AND LILIES. 

express the precisely accurate contraries of 
right character in the two great offices of the 
Church, — those of bishop and pastor. 
A " bishop " means '* a person who sees." 
A "pastor" means " a person who feeds." 
The most unbishoply character a man can 
have is therefore to be blind. 

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, 
to want to be fed, — to be a mouth. 

Take the two reverses together, and you have 
"blind mouths." We may advisably follow 
out this idea a little. Nearly all the evils in the 
Church have arisen from bishops desiring /c'Wt'r 
more than light. They want authority, not 
outlook ; whereas their real office is not to rule, 
though it may be vigorously to exhort and 
rebuke. It is the king's office to rule; the 
bishop's office is to oversee the flock, to number 
it, sheep by sheep, to be ready always to give 
full account of it. Now, it is 9lear he cannot 
give account of the souls, if he has not so much 
as numbered the bodies, of his flock. The first 
thing, therefore, that a bishop has to do is at 
least to put himself in a position in which, at any 
moment, he can obtain the history from child- 
hood of every living soul in his diocese, and of 
its present state. Down in that back street, 
Bill and Nancy knocking each other's teeth out, 
— does the bishop know all about it.'' Has he 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 73 

his eye upon them? Has he had \\\'s> eye upon 
them? Can he circumstantially explain to us 
how Bill got into the habit of beating Nancy 
about the head? If he cannot, he is no bishop, 
though he had a mitre as high as Salisbury 
steeple. He is no bishop, — he has sought to 
be at the helm instead of the mast-head ; he has 
no sight of things. " Nay," you say, " it is not 
his duty to look after Bill in the back street." 
What ! the fat sheep that have full fleeces, — 
you think it is only those he should look after, 
while (go back to your Milton) "the hungry 
sheep look up, and are not fed, besides what the 
grim wolf, with privy paw " (bishops knowing 
nothing about it) "daily devours apace, and 
nothing said " ? 

*' But that's not our idea of a bishop." ^ Per- 
haps not ; but it was Saint Paul's, and it was 
Milton's. They may be right, or we may be ; 
but we must not think we are reading either one 
or the other by putting our meaning into their 
words. 

23. I go on. 

" But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw." 

This is to meet the vulgar answer that "if 
the poor are not looked after in their bodies, 
they are in their souls ; they have spiritual food." 
^ Compare the 13th Letter in " Time and Tide." 



74 SESAME AND LILIES. 

And Milton says, " They have no such thing 
as spiritual food ; they are only swollen with 
wind." At first you may think that is a coarse 
type, and an obscure one. But again, it is a 
quite literally accurate one. Take up your Latin 
and Greek dictionaries and find out the meaning 
of " Spirit." It is only a contraction of the 
Latin word " breath, '^ and an indistinct trans- 
lation of the Greek word for "wind." The 
same word is used in writing, " The wind blow- 
eth where it listeth," and in writing, "So is 
every one that is born of the Spirit ; " born of 
the breath, that is, for it means the breath of 
God in soul and body. We have the true sense 
of it in our words " inspiration" and "expire." 
Now, there are two kinds of breath with which 
the flock may be filled, — God's breath and 
man's. The breath of God is health and life and 
peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the 
flocks on the hills ; but man's breath — the word 
which he calls spiritual — is disease and conta- 
gion to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot 
inwardly with it ; they are puffed up by it, as a 
dead body by the vapors of its own decomposi- 
tion. This is literally true of all false religious 
teaching ; the first and last and fatalest sign of 
it is that " pufiing up." Your converted chil- 
dren, who teach their parents ; your converted 
convicts, who teach honest men ; your converted 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 75 

dunces, who, having Hved in cretinous stupefac- 
tion half their lives, suddenly awaking to the 
fact of there being a God, fancy themselves 
therefore His pecuhar people and messengers ; 
your sectarians of every species, small and great. 
Catholic or Protestant, of High Church or Low, 
in so far as they think themselves exclusively in 
the right and others wrong ; and pre-eminently, 
in every sect, those who hold that men can be 
saved by thinking rightly instead of doing 
rightly, by work instead of act, and wish instead 
of work, — these are the true fog children ; 
clouds, these, without water; bodies, these, of 
putrescent vapor and skin, without blood or 
flesh, blown bagpipes for the fiends to pipe with, 
corrupt and corrupting, " Swoln with wind, and 
the rank mist they draw." 

24. Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting 
the power of the keys, for now we can under- 
stand them. Note the difference between Mil- 
ton and Dante, in their interpretation of this 
power; for once the latter is weaker in thought. 
He supposes both the keys to be of the gate of 
heaven ; one is of gold, the other of silver. 
They are given by Saint Peter to the sentinel 
angel ; and it is not easy to determine the mean- 
ing either of the substances of the three steps of 
the gate, or of the two keys. But Milton makes 
one, of gold, the key of heaven, the other, of 



'jG SESAME AND LILIES. 

iron, the key of the prison in which the wicked 
teachers are to be bound who " have taken away 
the key of knowledge, yet entered not in them- 
selves." 

We have seen that the duties of bishop and 
pastor are to see and feed, and of all who do so 
it is said, " He that watereth, shall be watered 
also himself." But the reverse is truth also. 
He that watereth not, shall be ivithered\\\vi\'&€ii\ 
and he that seeth not, shall himself be shut out 
of sight, — shut into the perpetual prison-house. 
And that prison opens here as well as hereafter ; 
he Avho is to be bound in heaven must first be 
bound on earth. That command to the strong 
angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, 
"Take him, and bind him hand and foot, and 
cast him out," issues, in its measure, against the 
teacher, for every help withheld, and for every 
truth refused, and for every falsehood enforced ; 
so that he is more strictly fettered the more he 
fetters, and farther outcast as he more and more 
misleads, till at last the bars of the iron cage 
close upon him, and as "the golden opes, the 
iron shuts amain." 

25. We have got something out of the lines, 
I think, and much more is yet to be found in 
them ; but we have done enough by w^ay of 
example of the kind of word-by-word examina- 
tion of your author which is rightly called " read- 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 7/ 

ing," — watching every accent and expression, 
and putting ourselves always in the author's 
place, annihilating our own personality, and 
seeking to enter into his, so as to be able assur- 
edly to say, " Thus Milton thought," not " Thus 
/ thought, in mis-reading Milton." And by this 
process you will gradually come to attach less 
weight to your own " Thus I thought" at other 
times. You will begin to perceive that what 
yoii thought was a matter of no serious impor- 
tance ; that your thoughts on any subjects are 
not perhaps the clearest and wisest that could 
be arrived at thereupon ; in fact, that unless you 
are a very singular person, you cannot be said 
to have any " thoughts " at all; that you have 
no materials for them in any serious matters,^ — 
no right to "think," but only to try to learn 
more of the facts. Nay, most probably all your 
life (unless, as I said, you are a singular person) 
you will have no legitimate right to an " opinion" 
on any business, except that instantly under 
your hand. What must of necessity be done 
you can always find out, beyond question, how 
to do. Have you a house to keep in order, a 
commodity to sell, a field to plough, a ditch to 
cleanse? There need be no two opinions about 

1 Modem " education " for the most part signifies giving 
people the faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable sub- 
ject of importance to them. 



yS SESAME AND LILIES. 

the proceedings ; it is at your peril if you have 
not much more than an " opinion " on the way 
to manage such matters. And also, outside of 
your own business, there are one or two subjects 
on which you are bound to have but one opin- 
ion, — that roguery and lying are objectionable, 
and are instantly to be flogged out of the way 
whenever discovered ; that covetousness and 
love of quarrelling are dangerous dispositions 
even in children, and deadly dispositions in men 
and nations ; that in the end, the God of heaven 
and earth loves active, modest, and kind people, 
and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones. 
On these general facts you are bound to have 
but one, and that a very strong, opinion. For 
the rest, respecting religions, governments, 
sciences, arts, you will find that on the whole 
you can know nothing, judge nothing ; that the 
best you can do, even though you maybe a well- 
educated person, is to be silent, and strive to be 
wiser every day, and to understand a little more 
of the thoughts of others, which so soon as you 
try to do honestly, you will discover that the 
thoughts even of the wisest are very little more 
than pertinent questions. To put the difficulty 
into a clear shape, and exhibit to you the grounds 
for ///decision, that is all they can generally do 
for you ; and well for them and for us if indeed 
they are able "to mix the music with our 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 79 

thoughts, and sadden us with heavenly doubts." 
This writer from whom I have been reading to 
you is not among the first or wisest. He sees 
shrewdly as far as he sees, and therefore it is 
easy to find out his full meaning ; but with the 
greater men you cannot fathom their meaning ; 
they do not even wholly measure it themselves, 
it is so wide. Suppose I had asked you, for 
instance, to seek for Shakespeare's opinion 
instead of Milton's on this matter of church 
authority, — or of Dante's ? Have any of you 
at this instant the least idea what either thought 
about it.? Have you ever balanced the scene 
with the bishops in Richard HI. against the 
character of Cranmer ; the description of Saint 
Francis and Saint Dominic against that of him 
who made Virgil wonder to gaze upon him, — 
" disteso, tanto vilmente, nell' eterno esilio ; " 
or of him whom Dante stood beside, "come '1 
frate che confessa lo perfido assassin " 1 1 Shake- 
speare and Alighieri knew men better than most 
of us, I presume. They were both in the midst 
of the main struggle between the temporal and 
spiritual powers. They had an opinion, we 
may guess. But where is it? Bring it into 
court ! Put Shakespeare's or Dante's creed into 
articles, and send it up for trial by the ecclesias- 
tical courts ! 

1 Inf. xxiii. 125, 126; xix. 49, 50. 



80 SESAME AND LILIES. 

26. You will not be able, I tell you again, for 
many and many a day to come at the real pur- 
poses and teaching of these great men ; but a 
very little honest study of them will enable you 
to perceive that what you took for your own 
"judgment" was mere chance prejudice and 
drifted, helpless, entangled weed of castaway 
thought, — nay, you will see that most men's 
minds are indeed little better than rough heath 
wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly bar- 
ren, partly overgrown with pestilent brakes and 
venomous, wind-sown herbage of evil surmise ; 
that the first thing you have to do for them and 
yourself is eagerly and scornfully to set fire to 
this, burn all the jungle into wholesome ash- 
heaps, and then plough and sow. All the true 
literary work before you, for life, must begin 
with obedience to that order, " Break up your 
fallow ground, and sow not among thorns .''' 

27. ((^)i Having then faithfully listened to 
the great teachers, that you may enter into their 
thoughts, you have yet this higher advance to 
make, — you have to enter into their hearts. 
As you go to them first for clear sight, so you 
must stay with them that you may share at last 
their just and mighty passion. Passion, or 
" sensation." I am not afraid of the word, still 
less of the thing. You have heard many out- 

1 Compare § 13 above. 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 8 1 

cries against sensation lately, but, I can tell you, 
it is not less sensation we want, but more. The 
ennobling difference between one man and 
another — between one animal and another — 
is precisely in this, that one feels more than 
another. If we w^ere sponges, perhaps sensation 
might not be easily got for us ; if we were earth- 
worms, liable at every instant to be cut in 
two by the spade, perhaps too much sensation 
might not be good for us. But being human 
creatures, // is good for us ; nay, we are only 
human in so far as we are sensitive, and our 
honor is precisely in proportion to our passion. 
28. You know I said of that great and pure 
society of the dead that it would allow " no vain 
or vulgar person to enter there." What do you 
think I meant by a " vulgar " person ? What do 
you yourselves mean by "vulgarity"? You 
will find it a fruitful subject of thought ; but, 
briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want 
of sensation. Simple and innocent vulgarity is 
merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness 
of body and mind ; but in true, inbred vulgarity, 
there is a dreadful callousness which in extremity 
becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit 
and crime, without fear, without pleasure, with- 
out horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt 
hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, 
in the hardened conscience, that men become 



82 SESAME AND LILIES. 

vulgar ; they are forever vulgar, precisely in pro- 
portion as they arc incapable of sympathy, of 
quick understanding, of all that, in deep insist- 
ence on the common but most accurate term, 
may be called the " tact " or " touch-faculty" of 
body and soul ; that tact which the Mimosa has 
in trees, which the pure woman has above all 
creatures, — fineness and fulness of sensation, 
beyond reason, the guide and sanctifier of reason 
itself. Reason can but determine what is true ; 
it is the God-given passion of humanity which 
alone can recognize what God has made good. 

29. We come, then, to that great concourse 
of the dead, not merely to know from them what 
is true, but chiefly to feel with them what is 
just. Now, to feel with them, we must be 
like them ; and none of us can become that 
without pains. As the true knowledge is dis- 
ciplined and tested knowledge, not the first 
thouglit that comes, so the true passion is dis- 
ciplined and tested passion, not the first passion 
that comes. The first that come are the vain, 
the false, the treacherous ; if you yield to them, 
they will lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, 
in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true pur- 
pose and no true passion left. Not that any 
feeling possible to humanity is in itself wrong, 
but only wrong when undisciplined. Its nobil- 
ity is in its force and justice ; it is wrong when 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 83 

it is weak, and felt for paltry cause. There is a 
mean wonder, as of a child who sees a juggler 
tossing golden balls, and this is base, if you 
will. But do you think that the wonder is ig- 
noble, or the sensation less, with which every 
human soul is called to watch the golden balls 
of heaven tossed through the night by the hand 
that made them? Thero is a mean curiosity, as 
of a child opening a forbidden door, or a servant 
prying into her master's business, and a noble 
curiosity, questioning, in the front of danger, 
the source of the great river beyond the sand, 
the place of the great continent beyond the sea ; 
a nobler curiosity still, which questions of the 
source of the River of Life, and of the space of 
the Continent of Heaven, — things which "the 
angels desire to look into." So the anxiety is 
ignoble with which you linger over the course and 
catastrophe of an idle tale ; but do you think the 
anxiety is less or greater with which you watch, 
or ought to watch, the dealings of fate and 
destiny with the life of an agonized nation,? 
Alas ! it is the narrowness, selfishness, minute- 
ness of your sensation that you have to deplore 
in England at this day, — sensation which 
spends itself in bouquets and speeches, in rev- 
ellings and junketings, in sham fights and gay 
puppet-shows, while you can look on and see 
noble nations murdered, man by man, without 
an effort or a tear. 



84 -SESAME AND LILIES. 

30. I said "minuteness" and "selfishness" 
of sensation ; but it would have been enough to 
have said " injustice" or " unrighteousness " of 
sensation. For as in nothing is a gentleman 
better to be discerned from a vulgar person, so 
in nothing is a gentle nation (such nations have 
been) better to be discerned from a mob than 
in this, — that their feelings are constant and 
just, results of due contemplation, and of equal 
thought. You can talk, a mob into anything; 
its feelings may be, — usually are, — on the 
whole, generous and right, but it has no foun- 
dation for them, no hold of them. You may 
tease or tickle it into any at your pleasure ; it 
thinks by infection, for the most part, catching 
an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing so 
little that it will not roar itself wild about, when 
the fit is on, nothing so great but it will forget 
in an hour when the fit is past. But a gentle- 
man's, or a gentle nation's, passions are just, 
measured, and continuous. A great nation, for 
instance, does not spend its entire national wits 
for a couple of months in weighing evidence of 
a single ruffian's having done a single murder, 
and for a couple of years see its own children 
murder each other by their thousands or tens of 
thousands a day, considering only what the 
effect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and 
caring nowise to determine which side of battle 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 85 

is in the wrong. Neither docs a great nation 
send its poor little boys to jail for stealing six 
walnuts ; and allow its bankrupts to steal their 
hundreds of thousands with a bow, and its 
bankers, rich with poor men's savings, to close 
their doors " under circumstances over which 
they have no control," with a " by your leave ; " 
and large landed estates to be bought by men 
who have made their money by going with armed 
steamers up and down the China Seas, selling 
opium at the cannon's mouth, and altering, for 
the benefit of the foreign nation, the common 
highwayman's demand of " your money or your 
life," into that of " your money and your life." 
Neither does a great nation allow the lives of its 
innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog 
fever, and rotted out of them by dunghill plague, 
for the sake of sixpence a life extra per week to 
its landlords,! and then debate, with drivelling 
tears and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought 
not piously to save, and nursingly cherish, the 
lives of its murderers. Also, a great nation hav- 
ing made up its mind that hanging is quite the 
wholesomest process for its homicides in gen- 
eral, can yet with mercy distinguish between the 
degrees of guilt in homicides, and does not yelp 

1 See note at end of lecture. I have put it in large type, be- 
cause the course of matters since it was written has made it per- 
haps better worth attention. 



S6 SESAME AND LILIES. 

like a pack of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the 
blood-track of an unhappy crazed boy, or gray- 
haired clodpate Othello, " perplexed i' the ex- 
treme," at the very moment that it is sending a 
minister of the crown to make polite speeches to 
a man who is bayoneting young girls in their 
fathers' sight, and killing noble youths in cold 
blood faster than a country butcher kills lambs 
in spring. And, lastly, a great nation does not 
mock Heaven and its Powers by pretending be- 
lief in a revelation which asserts the love of 
money to be the root of all evil, and declaring 
at the same time that it is actuated, and intends 
to be actuated, in all chief national deeds and 
measures, by no other love. 

31. My friends, I do not know why any of us 
should talk about reading. We want some 
sharper discipline than that of reading, but, at 
all events, be assured, we cannot read. No 
reading is possible for a people with its mind in 
this state. No sentence of any great writer is 
intelligible to them. It is simply and sternly 
impossible for the English public at this moment 
to understand any thoughtful writing, — so in- 
capable of thought has it become in its insanity 
of avarice. Happily, our disease is as yet little 
worse than this incapacity of thought ; it is not 
corruption of the inner nature : we ring true 
still, when anything strikes home to us ; and 



QF KINGS' TREASURIES. 8/ 

though the idea that everything should " pay" 
has infected our every purpose so deeply that 
even when we would play the good Samaritan, 
we never take out our twopence and give them 
to the host without saying, " When I come 
again thou shalt give me fourpence," there is a 
capacity of noble passion left in our hearts' core. 
We show it in our work, in our war, even in 
those unjust domestic affections which make us 
furious at a small private wrong, while we are 
polite to a boundless public one. We are still 
industrious to the last hour of the day, though 
we add the gambler's fury to the laborer's 
patience ; we are still brave to the death, though 
incapal)le of discerning true cause for battle, and 
are still true in affection to our own flesh, to tlie 
death, as the sea-monsters are, and the rock- 
eagles. And there is hope for a nation while 
this can be still said of it. As long as it holds 
its life in its hand, ready to give it for its honor 
(though a foolish honor), for its love (though 
a selfish love), and for its business (though a 
base business), there is hope for it. But hope 
only ; for this instinctive, reckless virtue cannot 
last. No nation can last which has made a mob 
of itself, however generous at heart. It must 
discipline its passions and direct them, or they 
will discipline //, one day, with scorpion-whips. 
Above all, a nation cannot last as a money-mak- 



88 SESAME AND LILIES. 

in;;' mob ; it cannot with inipunity, — it cnnnot 
with existence, — go on despising literature, de- 
spising science, despising art, despising nature, 
despising compassion, and concentrating its soul 
on pence. Do you think these are harsh or wild 
words? Have patience with me but a little 
longer. I will prove their truth to you, clause 
by clause. 

32. {a) I say first we have despised literature. 
What do we, as a nation, care about books? 
How much do you think we spend altogether on 
our libraries, public or private, as compared with 
what we spend on our horses? If a man spends 
lavishly on his library, you call him mad, — a bib- 
liomaniac. But you never call anyone a horss- 
maniac, though men ruin themselves every day 
by their horses, and you do not hear of people 
ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go 
lower still, how much do you think the contents 
of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, 
public and private, would fetch, as compared 
with the contents of its wine-cellars? What 
position would its expenditure on literature take, 
as compared with its expenditure on luxurious 
eating? We talk of food for the mind as of food 
for the body. Now, a good book contains such 
food inexhaustibly : it is a provision for life, and 
for the best part of us ; yet how long most peo- 
ple would look at the best book before they 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 89 

would give the price oi a large turbot for it ! — 
though there have been men who have pinched 
their stomaclis and bared their backs to buy a 
book, whose libraries were cheaper to them, I 
think, in the end, than most men's dinners are. 
We are few of us put to such trial, and more is 
the pity; for indeed, a precious thing is all the 
more precious to us if it has been won by work 
or economy. And if public libraries were half 
as costly as public dinners, or books cost the 
tenth part of what bracelets do, even foolish 
men and women might sometimes suspect there 
was good in reading, as well as in munching and 
sparkling ; whereas the very cheapness of litera- 
ture is making even wise people forget that if a 
book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No 
book is worth anything which is not worth much ; 
nor is it serviceable until it has been read and 
re-read, and loved and loved again, and marked, 
so that you can refer to the passages you want 
in it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he needs 
in an armory, or a housewife bring the spice she 
needs from her store. Bread of flour is good, 
but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would 
eat it, in a good book ; and the family must be 
poor indeed, which, once in their lives, cannot 
for such multipliable barley-loaves pay their 
baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, 
and we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb 
each other's books out of circulatinir libraries. 



90 SESAME AND LILIES. 

33. (/;) I say we have despised science. 
"What!" you exclaim, " are we not foremost 
in all discovery,' and is not the whole world 
giddy by reason, or unreason, of our inven- 
tions?'' Yes, but do you suppose that is na- 
tional work ? That work is all done in spite of 
the nation, by private people's zeal and money. 
We are glad enough, indeed, to make our profit 
of science. We snap up anything in the way of 
a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly 
enough ; but if the scientific man comes for a 
bone or a crust to us, that is another story. 
What have we publicly done for science ? We 
are obliged to know what o'clock it is, for the 
safety of our ships, and therefore we pay for an 
observatory ; and we allow ourselves, in the per- 
son of our Parliament, to be annually tormented 
into doing something, in a slovenly way, for ths 
British Museum, sullenly apprehending that to 
be a place for keeping stuffed birds in, to amuse 
our children. If anybody will pay for their own 
telescope, and resolve another nebula, we cackle 
over the discernment as if it were our own. If 
one in ten thousand of our hunting squires sud- 
denly perceives that the earth was indeed made 

1 Since this was written, the answer has become definitely — 
No, we having surrendered the field of Arctic discovery to the 
Continental nations, as being ourselves too poor to pay for 
ships. 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 9 1 

to be something else than a portion for foxes, 
and burrows in it himself and tells us where the 
gold is and where the coals, we understand that 
there is some use in that, and very properly 
knight him ; but is the accident of his having 
found out how to employ himself usefully any 
credit to 7is ? (The negation of such discovery 
among his brother squires may perhaps be some 
disQx^dSX to us, if we would consider of it.) But 
if you doubt these generalities, here is one fact 
for us all to meditate upon, illustrative of our 
love of science. Two years ago there was a 
collection of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold 
in Bavaria, — the best in existence, containing 
many specimens unique for perfectness, and one, 
unique as an example of a species (a whole king- 
dom of ynknown living creatures being an- 
nounced by that fossil). This collection, of 
which the mere market worth, among private 
buyers, would probably have been some thou- 
sand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to 
the English nation for seven hundred ; but we 
would not give seven hundred, and the whole 
series would have been in the Munich Museum 
at this moment, if Professor Owen 1 had not, 

1 I state this fact without Professor Owen's permission, 
which of course he could not with propriety have granted, had 
I asked it; but I consider it so important that the public should 
be aware of the fact, that I do what seems to me right, though 
rude. 



92 SESAME AND LILIES. 

with loss of his own time, and patient torment- 
ing of the British public in person of its repre- 
sentatives, got leave to give four hundred 
pounds at once, and himself become answerable 
for the other three, which the said public will 
doubtless pay him eventually, but sulkily, and 
caring nothing about the matter all the while, 
only always ready to cackle if any credit comes 
of it. Consider, I beg of you, arithmetically, 
what this fact means. Your annual expenditure 
for public purposes (a third of it for military 
apparatus) is at least fifty millions. Now seven 
hundred pounds is to fifty million pounds, 
roughly, as sevenpence is to two thousand 
pounds. Suppose, then, a gentleman of un- 
known income, but whose wealth was to be con- 
jectured from the fact that he spent twc^thousand 
a year on his park walls and footmen only, pro- 
fesses himself fond of science ; and that one of 
his servants comes eagerly to tell him that an 
unique collection of fossils, giving clew to a 
new era of creation, is to be had for the sum of 
sevenpence sterling ; and that the gentleman, 
who is fond of science, and spends two thousand 
a year on his park, answers, after keeping his 
servant waiting several months, "Well, Pll 
give you fourpence for them, if you will be an- 
swerable for the extra threepence yourself till 
next year ! " 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 93 

34. (6^) I say you have despised art ! " What ! " 
you again answer, " have we not art exhibitions, 
miles long ; and do not we pay thousands of 
pounds for single pictures ; and have we not art 
schools and institutions, more than ever nation 
had before?" Yes, truly, but all that is for the 
sake of the shop. You would fain sell canvas 
as well as coals, and crockery as well as iron ; 
you would take every other nation's bread out 
of its mouth if you could. ^ Not being able to do 
that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thor- 
oughfares of the world, like Ludgate apprentices, 
screaming to every passer-by, "What d'ye 
lack ? " You know nothing of your own facul- 
ties or circumstances. You fancy that among 
your damp, flat, fat fields of clay you can have 
as quick art fancy as the Frenchman among his 
bronzed vines, or the Italian under his volcanic 
cliffs ; that art may be learned as book-keeping 
is, and when learned, will give you more books 
to keep. You care for pictures absolutely no 
more than you do for the bills pasted on your 
dead walls. There is always room on the wall 
for the bills to be read, — never for the pictures , 
to be seen. You do not know what pictures you , 

1 That was our real idea of " Free Trade," — " All the trade | 
to myself ." You find now that by " competition " other people | 
can manage to sell something as well as you — and now we I 
call for " Protection " again. Wretches 1 ' 



94 SKSAA//': AND LILIES. 

have (by repute) in (he eountry, nor wlietlicr 
Ihey are false or true, nor whether they are taken 
care of or not; in foreign countries, you calmly 
see the noblest existing pictures in the world 
rotting in abandoned wreck (in Venice you saw 
the Austrian guns deliberately pointed at the 
palaces containing them), and if you heard that' 
all the fine pictures in Europe were made into 
sand bags to-morrow on the Austrian forts, it 
would not trouble you so much as the chance of 
a brace or two of game less in your own bags, 
in a day's shooting. That is your national love 
of art. 

35. (r/) You have despised Nature; that is 
to say, all the deep and sacred sensations of 
natural scenery. The French revolutionists 
made stables of the cathedrals of France ; you 
have \\\\\(\v racecourses of the cathedrals of the 
oaith. \()ur one conception of j^leasure is to 
drive in railroad carriages rt)und their aisles, 
and eat olf their altars.' You have put a rail- 
road-bridge over the falls of Schatfhausen. You 
have tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne by TelPs 
chai)el ; you have destroyed the Clarens shore 
of the Lake of (ieneva; there is woi a quiet 

' I meant lliat (lie licaiitiful places of the world, — Switzer- 
land, Italy, South (lermaiiy, and so on, — are, indeed, liie 
truest cathedrals — places to be reverent in, and to worship in; 
and that we only care to drive tlirouj;h them ; and to eat and 
drink at their most sacred places. 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 95 

valley in England that you have not filled with 
bellowing fire ; there is no particle left of Eng- 
lish land which you have not trampled coal 
ashes into,^ — nor any foreign city in which the 
spread of your presence is not marked among 
its fair old streets and happy gardens by a con- 
suming white leprosy of new hotels and per- 
fumers' shops. The Alps themselves, which your 
own poets used to love so reverently, you look 
upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, which 
you set yourselves to climb and slide down 
again, with "shrieks of delight." When you 
are past shrieking, having no human articulate 
voice to say you are glad with, you fill the 
quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, 
and rush home red with cutaneous eruption of 
conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough 
of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sor- 
rowfullest spectacles I have ever seen in 
humanity, taking the deep inner significance of 
them, are the English mobs in the valley of 
Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty 
howitzers ; and the Swiss vintagers of Zurich, 
expressing their Christian thanks for the gift of 
the vine by assembling in knots in the " towers 
of the vineyards," and slowly loading and firing 

1 I was singularly struck, some years ago, by finding all the 
river shore at Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in its earth from 
lilt; mere drift of soot-laden air from places many miles away. 



96 SESAME AND LILIES. 

horse-pistols from morning till evening. It is 
pitiful to have dim conceptions of duty ; more 
pitiful, it seems to me, to have conceptions like 
these of mirth. 

36. Lastly, you despise compassion. There 
is no need of words of mine for proof of this. 
1 will merely print one of the newspaper para- 
graphs which I am in the habit of cutting out 
and throwing into my store-drawer; here is one 
from a Ddily Telegraph of an early date this 
year (1867) ; (date which, though by me care- 
lessly left unmarked, is easily discoverable ; for 
on the back of the slij^ there is tlie announce- 
ment that '* yesterday the seventh of the special 
services of this year was performed by the 
lUshop of Ripon in St. Paul's " ) ; it relates only 
one of such tacts as happen now daily ; this by 
chance having taken a form in which it came 
before the coroner. I will print the paragraph 
in red. Be sure, the facts themselves are 
written in that color, in a book which we shall 
all of us, literate or illiterate, have to read our 
page of, some day.' 

An inquiry was held on Friday by IVIr. 
Richards, deputy coroner, at the White Horse 
tavern, Christ Church, Spitalfields, respecting 
the death of Michael Collins, aged 58 years. 

* In the Kn;^lish ccUtiun the f(.)llo\viiig matter, to § 37, was 
printed in red ink. 



OF K'INC.S' TNI'lASUNIES. 9/ 

Mary Collins, a miserable-looking woman, said 
that she lived with the deceased and .his son in 
a room at 2, Cohb's Court, Christ Church. 
Deceased was a " translator '' of boots. Wit- 
ness went out and bought old boots ; deceased 
and his son made them into good ones, and 
then witness sold them for what she could get at 
the shops, which was \cry little indeed. 
Deceased and his son used to work night and 
day to try and get a little bread and tea, and pay 
for the room (2J-. a week), so as to keep the 
home together. On Friday-night week, deceased 
g(jt up from his bench and began to shiver. 
Jle threw down the boots, saying, "Somebody 
else must finish them when I am gone, for I can 
do no more." There was no fire, and he said, 
"I would be better if I was warm." Witness 
therefore took two pairs of " translated" boots ^ 
to sell at the shop ; but she could only get \/\d. 
for the two pairs, for the people at the shop said, 
" We must have our profit." Witness got 
I4ll;s. (jf coal, anfl a little tea and bread. Her 
s(m sat up the whole night to make the " trans- 
lations," to get money, but deceased died on 
Saturday morning. The family never had 
enough to eat. — Coroner: "It seems to me 

1 One of llie tlilnj^s wlilcli wc must very resolutely enforce, for 
tli<; good of all classes, in our future arrangements, must Ije that 
they wear no " translated " article of dress. See tlie preface. 



98 SKSAME AA'D LlfJES. 

(It'jjlorahle that yon did not t^o into the work- 
house." ► Witness: " We wanted the comforts 
of our little home.''^ A juror asked what the 
comforts were, for he only saw a little straw in 
the corner of the room, the windows of which 
were l)roken. The witness be.iijan to cry, and 
said that they had a (luilt and other little thinii^s. 
Tlie deceased said he never would i^o into the 
workhouse. In sunnnei', when tiie season was 
j;oo(l, they sonietinics made as much as lo.s'. 
profit in (he week. They then always saved 
towards (he next week, which was <;enerally a 
bad our. In win(er (hey made not half so 
much. l"or three years they had been getting 
from had to worse. — Cornelius Collins said that 
he iiad assisted his father since 1847. They 
used to work so far into the ni>;ht that both 
nearly lost their eyesi<>ht. Witness now had 
a film over his eyes. Five years as;o deceased 
applied to the parish for aid. The relieving 
officer gave him a .|lb. loaf, and told him if he 
came again he should ,i;e( the "stones.''^ That 

• 'I'liis ;il)l)ri'vi,iti()n of the ]K'iKilty of useless labor is 
cuiioiisly coiiuiileiil in vcih.il form with a ccilain i)assai;c which 
somo of us may ivnuMuhor. It may perhaps be well to pre- 
serve beside this paraj;raph aiu)ther cutlini; out of iny store- 
drawer, from the Afomini^ /'osf, of about a i>arallel date, 

Friday, March lo, 1865 : — " The saions of Mine. C , who 

did the honors with clever imitative grace and elegance, were 
crowded with princes, dukes, marquises, and counts — in fact, 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. (yg 

disgusted deceased, and lu; \v(jul(I have nothiiii; 
to do witli tlicm since. 'I'licy <r()i worse and 
worse until last Friday week, when they had not 
even a halfpenny to buy a candle. Deceased 
then lay down on the straw, and .said he could 
not live till morning. — A juror : "You arc 
dyini^^ of starvation yourself, and you ought to 
go into the house until the suininc-r.'" — Witness : 
" n we went in, W(-' should die. When we came 
out in the summer, vve should Ik.' like i)eo]>le 
(lr()j)|):'d from the sky. No one would kn(nv us, 

willi the same Mia/e compiiiiy as one meets -'it tlie ])arties of llie 
Triiiciss Mcticriiich and Madame JJroiiyii de Lliuys. Some 
Enj^lisli peers and members of I'arliament were i)res(;nt, and 
appeared to enjoy ttic animated and dazzling improper scene. 
On the second floor the siijjper tabli.-s were loarled willi eviry 
delicacy of tlie season. 'J'liat your readers may form some idea 
of the dainty fare of the Parisian demi-monde, I cojjy the nn^nu 
of the supjier, which was «erved to ail the guests (about 200) 
seated at four o'clock. Clioice Yquem, Johannisberg, Laffitte, 
Tokay, and cliampagne of tlie finest vintages were servetl most 
lavishly throughout tlie morning. After supjjer dancing was 
resumed with increased animation, and the ball terminated with 
a chaine dinbolique and a cancan d^eri/er at seven in the morn- 
ing. ( Morning service — ' Kre the fn.-sh lawns ap])cared, tinder 
the opening eyelids of the Morn') Here is the menu: — 
' ConsfJhimi? dc volaille i la I'agration : id hors-d'ctuvrcs varies. 
Bouchdcs i la Talleyrand. Saumons froids, sauce Havigote. 
Filets de boeuf en I'elleviie, timljales milaiiaises, chaudfroid de 
gibicr. Diodes truf?(^'C8. PAtds de foies gras, buissons d'd- 
crevisses, salades vdndtiennes, geldes blanches aux fruits, 
gateaux mancini, jiarisien et parisiennes. I'romages glacc-s. 
Ananas. Dessert.'" 



100 SESAME AND LILIES. 

and wc would not have even a room. I could 
work now ill had food, for my sight woiild get 
better/' Dr. (r. P. Walker said deceased died 
from syncope, from exhaustion from want of 
food. The deceased had had no bedclothes. For 
four months he had had nothing but bread to 
cat. There was not a particle of fat in the body. 
There was no disease, but if there had been 
medical attendance, he might have survived the 
syncope, or fainting. The coroner having re- 
marked upon the painful nature of the casii, the 
jury returned the following verdict, " That 
deceased died from exhaustion from want of 
food and the common necessaries of life ; also 
through want of medical aid.'' 

37. " Why would witness not go into the work- 
house? " you ask. Well, the poor seem to have 
a prejudice against the workhouse which the rich 
have not ; for of course every one who takes a pen- 
sion from Government goes into the w^orkhouse 
on a grand scale ; ' only the workhouses for the 
rich do not involve the idea of work, and should 
be called play-houses. But the poor like to 
die independently, it apjiears ; perhaps Jf we 
made the i)lay-houses for them pretty anil pleas- 

1 Please observe this statement, and think of it, and con- 
sider how it happens that a poor old woman will be ashamed to 
take a shilling a week from the conntry, but no one is ashamed 
to take a pension of a thousand a year. 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. lOI 

ant enough, or gave them their pensions at 
home, and allowed them a little introductory 
peculation with the public money, their minds 
might be reconciled to the conditions. Mean- 
time, here are the facts : we make our relief either 
so insulting to them, or so painful, that they rather 
(lie than take it at our hands ; or, for third alter- 
native, we leave them so untaught and foolish 
th;it tliey starve like brute creatures, wild and 
dumb, not knowing what to do, or what to 
ask. I say, you despise compassion; if you did 
not, sucli a newspaper paragraph would be as 
impossible in a Christian country as a deliberate 
assassination permitted in its public streets.' 

1 I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the Pall Mall 
Gazette established ; for the power of the press in the hands 
of higlily-cducated men, in independent position, and of honest 
l)urp()se, may, indeed, become all that it has been hitherto 
vainly vaunted to be. Its editor will therefore, I doubt not, 
jjardon me, in that, by very reason of my respect for the 
journal, I do not let pass unnoticed an article in its third num- 
ber, page 5, which was wrong in every word of it, with the in- 
tense wrongncss which only an honest man can achieve who 
has taken a false turn of thought in the outset, and is following 
it, regardless of consequences. It contained at the end this 
notable passage : — ' 

"The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction — aye, 
and the bedstead and blankets of affliction, are the very utmost 
that the law ought to give to outcasts merely as outcasts.''^ I 
merely put beside this expression of the gentlemanly mind of 
England in 1865, a part of the message which Isaiah was 
ordered to " lift up his voice like a trumpet " in declaring to the 
gentlemen of his day : " Ye fast for strife, and to smite with the 



I02 SESAME AND LILIES. 

" Christian " did I say? Alas, if we were but 
wliolesomely //^-Christian, it would be impossi- 
ble ; it is our imaginary Christianity that helps 
us to commit these crimes, for we revel and 
luxuriate in our faith, for the lewd sensation of 
it ; dressing it up, like everything else, in fiction. 
The dramatic Christianity of the organ and 
aisle, of dawn-service and twilight-revival, — 
the Christianity which we do not fear to mix the 
mockery of,»pictorially, with our play about the 
devil, in our Satanellas, Roberts, Fausts ; 
chanting hymns through traceried windows for 
background effect, and artistically modulating 
the " Dio" through variation on variation of 

fist of wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to 
deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor tJutt 
are cast out [margin, " afflicted "] to thy house ? " The falsehood 
on which the writer had mentally founded himself, as previously 
stated by him, was this : "To confound the functions of the 
dispensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers of a 
charitable institution is a great and pernicious error." This 
sentence is so accurately and exquisitely wrong, that its sub- 
stance must be thus reversed in our minds before we can deal 
with any existing problem of national distress. " To under- 
stand that the dispensers of the poor-rates are the almoners of 
the nation, and should distribute its alms with a gentleness and 
freedom of hand as much greater and franker than that possible 
to individual charity as the collective national wisdom and power 
may be supposed greater than those of any single person, is the 
foundation of all law respecting pauperism." (Since this was 
written the Pall Mall Gazette has become a mere party- 
paper like the rest ; but it writes well, and does more good than 
mischief on the whole.) 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. IO3 

mimicked prayer, while we distribute tracts next 
day, for tlie benefit of uncultivated swearers, 
upon what we suppose to be the signification of 
the Third Commandment. This gas-lighted 
and gas-inspired Christianity we are triumphant 
in, and draw back the hem of our robes from the 
touch of the heretics who dispute it. But to do 
a piece of common Christian righteousness in a 
plain English word or deed, to make Christian 
law any mle of life and found one national act or 
hope thereon, — we know too well what our 
faith comes to for that ! You might sooner get 
lightning out of incense smoke than true action 
or passion out of your modern English religion. 
You had better get rid of the smoke and the 
organ pipes, both. Leave them and the Gothic 
windows and the painted glass to the property 
man ; give up your carburetted hydrogen ghost 
in one healthy expiration, and look after Lazarus 
at the doorstep. For there is a true church 
wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and 
that is the only holy or Mother Church which 
ever was, or ever shall be. 

38. All these pleasures then, and all these 
virtues, I repeat, you nationally despise. You 
have, indeed, men among you who do not ; by 
whose work, by whose strength, by whose life, 
by whose death, you live, and never thank them. 
Your wealth, your amusement, your pride, would 



104 SESAME AND LI LIES. 

all be alike impossible, but for those whom you 
scorn or forget. The policeman, who is walking 
up and down tlie black lane all night to watch 
the guilt you have created there, and may have 
his brains beaten out, and be maimed for life, at 
any moment, and never be thanked ; the sailor 
wrestling with the sea's rage ; the quiet student 
poring over his book or his phial ; the common 
worker, without praise, and nearly without 
bread, fulfilling his task as your horses drag your 
carts, hopeless, and spurned of all : these are the 
men by whom England lives ; but they are not 
the nation ; they are only the body and nervous 
force of it, acting still from old habit in a con- 
vulsive perseverance, while the mind is gone. 
Our national wish and purpose are only to be 
amused ; our national religion is the performance 
of church ceremonies, and preaching of soporific 
truths (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at 
work, while we amuse ourselves ; and the 
necessity for this amusement is fastening on us, 
as a feverous disease of parched throat and 
wandering eyes — senseless, dissolute, merci- 
less. How literally that^ word i-Z/j-ease, the 
negation and possibility of case, expresses the 
entire moral state of our English industry and 
its amusements. 

39. When men are rightly occupied, their 
amusement grows out of their work, as the 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. I05 

color-petals out of a fruitful flower ; when they 
are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all 
their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual^ 
and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to 
the body. But now, having no true business, 
we pour our whole masculine energy into the 
false business of money-making ; and having no 
true emotion, we must have false emotions 
dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, 
as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly, 
as the idolatrous Jews with their pictures on 
cavern walls, which men had to dig to detect. 
The justice we do not execute, we mimic in the 
novel and on the stage ; for the beauty we 
destroy in Nature, we substitute the metamor- 
phosis of the pantomime, and (the human nature 
of us imperatively requiring awe and sorrow of 
S07ne kind) for the noble grief we should have 
borne wdth our fellows, and the pure tears we 
should have wept with them, we gloat over the 
pathos of the police court, and gather the night- 
dew of the grave. 

40. It is difficult to estimate the true signifi- 
cance of these things ; the facts are frightful 
enough. The measure of national fault involved 
in them is, perhaps, not as great as it would at 
first seem. We permit or cause thousands of 
deaths daily, but we mean no harm ; we set fire 
to houses and ravage peasants' fields, yet we 



I06 SESAME AND LILIES. 

should be sorry to find we had injured anybody. 
We are still kind at heart ; still capable of virtue, 
but only as children are. Chalmers, at the end 
of his long life, having had much power with the 
public, being plagued in some serious matter by 
a reference to "public opinion," uttered the 
impatient exclamation, " The public is just a great 
baby ! " And the reason that I have allowed all 
these graver subjects of thought to mix them- 
selves up with an inquiry into methods of read- 
ing is, that the more I see of our national faults 
or miseries, the more they resolve themselves 
into conditions of childish illiterateness and want 
of education in the most ordinary habits of 
thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfish- 
ness, not dulness of brain, which we have to 
lament ; but an unreachable schoolboy's reckless- 
ness, only differing from the true schoolboy's in 
itsincapacity of being helped, because it acknowl- 
edges no master. 

41. There is a curious type of us given in one 
of the lovely, neglected works of the last of our 
great painters. It is a drawing of Kirkby Lons- 
dale churchyard, and of its brook and valley 
and hills and folded morning sky beyond. And 
unmindful alike of these, and of the dead who 
have left these for other valleys and for other 
skies, a group of schoolboys have piled their 
little books upon a grave, to strike them off with 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. lO/ 

stones. So, also, we play with the words 
of the dead that would teach us, and strike 
them far from us with our bitter, reckless will ; 
little thinking that those leaves which the wind 
scatters had been piled, not only upon a grave- 
stone, but upon the seal of an enchanted vault 
— nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings, 
who would awake for us, and walk with us, if we 
knew but how to call them by their names. 
How often, even if we lift the marble entrance 
gate, do we but wander among those old kings 
in their repose, and finger the robes they lie in, 
and stir the crowns on their foreheads ; and still 
they are silent to us, and seem but a dusty ima- 
gery, because we know not the incantation of 
the heart that would wake them, — which, if they 
once heard, they would start up to meet us in 
their power of long ago, narrowly to look upon 
us, and consider us ; and as the fallen kings of 
Hades meet the newly fallen, saying, " Art thou 
also become weak as we, — art thou also become 
one of us ? " so would these kings, with their un- 
dimmed, unshaken diadems, meet us, saying, 
' ' Art thou also become pure and mighty of heart 
as we, — art thou also become one of us ? " 

42. Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — mag- 
nanimous — to be this, is, indeed, to be great in 
life ; to become this increasingly, is, indeed, to 
"advance in life," — in life itself, not in the 



I08 SESAME AND LILIES. 

trappings of it. My friends, do you remember 
that old Scythian custom, when the head of a 
house died ? How he was dressed in his finest 
dress, and set in his chariot, and carried about 
to his friends' houses ; and eacli of them placed 
him at his table's head, and all feasted in his 
presence? Suppose it were offered to you in 
plain words, as it is offered to you in dire facts, 
that you should gain this Scythian honor grad- 
ually, while you yet thought yourself alive. 
Suppose the offer were this : You shall die slowly ; 
your blood shall daily grow cold, your flesh pet- 
rify, your heart beat at last only as a rusted 
group of iron valves. Your life shall fade from 
you, and sink through the earth into the ice of 
Caina ; but day by day your body shall be dressed 
more gayly, and set in higher chariots, and have 
more orders on its breast — crowns on its head, 
if you will. Men shall bow before it, stare and 
shout round it, crowd after it up and down the 
streets ; build palaces for it ; feast with it at 
their tables' head all the night long. Your soul 
shall stay enough within it to know what they 
do, and feel the weight of the golden dress on 
its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge 
on the skull ; — no more. Would you take the 
offer verbally made by the death-angel ? Would 
the meanest among us take it, think you .'' Yet 
practically and verily we grasp at it, every one 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. IO9 

of us, in a measure ; many of us grasp at it in its 
fulness of horror. Every man accepts it who 
desires to advance in life without knowing what 
life is ; who means only that he has to get 
more horses and more footmen and more fortune 
and more public honor, and — not more personal 
soul. He only is advancing in life whose heart 
is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose 
brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living ^ 
peace. And the men who have this life in them 
are the true lords or kings of the earth — they, 
and they only. All other kingships, so far as 
they are true, are only the practical issue and 
expression of theirs ; if less than this, they are 
either dramatic royalties, — costly shows, set 
off, indeed, with real jewels instead of tinsel, but 
still only the toys of nations, — or else they are 
no royalties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere 
active and practical issue of national folly ; for 
which reason I have said of them elsewhere, 
*' Visible governments are the toys of some na- 
tions, the diseases of others, the harness of 
some, the burdens of more." 

43. But I have no words for the wonder with 
which I hear kinghood still spoken of, even 
among thoughtful men, as if governed nations 
were a personal property, and might be bought 
and sold, or otherwise acquired, as sheep, of 

1 TO 6e <|)p6vrjjiAa toO jrvevjoiaTOs ^w»} ««<• eip^i/jj. 



no SESAME A. YD LILIES. 

whose flesh their king was to feed, and whose 
fleece he was to gather ; as if Achilles' indig- 
nant epithet of base kings, " people-eating,"" 
were the constant and proper title of all mon- 
archs ; and enlargement of a king's dominion 
meant the same thing as the increase of a pri- 
vate man's estate ! Kings who think so, how- 
ever powerful, can no more be the true kings of 
the nation than gadflies are the kings of a horse ; 
they suck it, and may drive it wild, but do not 
guide it. They and their courts and their armies 
are, if one could see clearly, only a large species 
of marsh mosquito, with bayonet proboscis and 
melodious, bandmaster trumpeting in the sum- 
mer air; the twilight being, perhaps, sometimes 
fairer, but hardly more wholesome, for its glit- 
tering mists of midge companies. The true 
kings, meanwhile, ruled quietly, if at all, and 
hate ruling ; too many of them make // gran 
rijiuto ; and if they do not, the mob as soon as 
they are likely to become useful to it, is pretty 
sure to make its gran rifiuto oi thevi. 

44. Yet the visible king may also be a true 
one some day, if ever day comes when he will 
estimate his dominion by ih^ force of it, — not the 
geographical boundaries. It matters very little 
whether Trent cuts you a cantel out here, or 
Rhine rounds you a castle less there ; but it does 
matter to you, king of men, whether you can 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. Ill 

verily say to this man " Go," and he goeth, and 
to another, " Come," and he cometh. Whether 
you can turn your people as you can Trent ; and 
where it is that you bid them come, and where 
go. It matters to you, king of men, whether 
your people hate you, and die by you, or love 
you, and live by you. You may measure your 
dominion by multitudes, better than by miles ; 
and count degrees of love-latitude, not from, but 
to, a wonderfully warm and infinite equator. 

45. Measure! — nay, you cannot measure. 
Who shall measure the difference between the 
power of those who " do and teach," and who 
are greatest in the kingdoms of earth, as of 
heaven, and the power of those who undo and 
consume, whose power, at the fullest, is only the 
power of the moth and the rust ? Strange ! to 
think how the Moth-kings lay up treasures for 
the moth ; and the Rust-kings, who are to their 
people's strength as rust to armor, lay up treas- 
ures for the rust ; and the Robber-kings, treas- 
ures for the robber ; but how few kings have 
ever laid up treasures that needed no guarding 
— of which the more thieves there were the 
better! Broidered robe, only to be rent; helm 
and sword, only to be dimmed ; jewel and gold, 
only to be scattered ; — there have been three 
kinds of kings who have gathered these. Sup- 
pose there ever should arise a fourth order of 



112 SESAME AND LILIES. 

kings -who had read in some obscure writing of 
long ago that there was a fourth kind of treas- 
ure which the jewel and gold could not equal, 
neither should it be valued with pure gold. A 
web made fair in the weaving by Athena's shut- 
tle ; an armor forged in divine fire by Vulcanian 
force ; a gold to be mined in the very sun's 
red heart, where he sets over the Delphian cliffs, 
— deep-pictured tissue, impenetrable armor, 
portable gold, the three great Angels of Conduct, 
Toil, and Thought, still calling to us, and wait- 
ing at the posts of our doors, to lead us with 
their winged power, and guide us with their un- 
erring eyes, by the path which no fowl knoweth, 
and which the vulture's eye has not seen ! Sup- 
pose kings should ever arise who heard and 
believed this word, and at last gathered and 
brought forth treasures of Wisdom for their 
people. 

46. Think what an amazing business that 
would be ! How inconceivable in the state of 
our present national wisdom ! That we should 
bring up our peasants to a book exercise instead 
of a bayonet exercise! — organize, drill, main- 
tain with pay and good generalship, armies of 
thinkers, instead of armies of stabbers ! — fine 
national amusement in reading-rooms as well as 
rifle-grounds ; give prizes for a fair shot at a 
fact, as well as for a leaden splash on a target. 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. II3 

What an absurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, 
that the wealth of the capitalists of civilized 
nations should ever come to support literature 
instead of war ! 

47. Have yet patience with me while I read 
you a single sentence out of the only book, prop- 
erly to be called a book, that 1 have yet written 
myself, the one that will stand, (if anything 
stand,) surest and longest of all work of mine : — 

" It is one very awful form of the operation of 
wealth in Europe that it is entirely capitalists' wealth 
which supports unjust wars. Just wars do not need 
so much money to support them; for most of the men 
who wage such, wage them gratis; but for an unjust 
war, men's bodies and souls have both to be bought, 
and the best tools of war for them besides, which 
makes such war costly to the maximum; not to speak 
of the cost of l)ase fear and angry suspicion between 
nations which have not grace nor honesty enough in 
all their multitudes to buy an hour's peace of mind 
with; as, at present, France and England, purchas- 
ing of each other ten millions sterling worth of con- 
sternation, annually (a remarkably light crop, half 
thorns and half aspen leaves, sown, reaped, and 
granaried by the ' science ' of the modern political 
economist, teaching covetousness instead of truth). 
And all unjust war being supportable, if not by pil- 
lage of the enemy, only by loans from capitalists, 
these loans are repaid by subsequent taxation of the 



114 SESAME AND LILIES. 

pcopK;, who appear to have no will in the matter, 
the capitalists' will being the primary root of the war; 
but its real root is the covetousness of the whole 
nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frankness, or 
justice, and bringing al)out, therefore, indue time, his 
own separate loss and jjunishment to each person." 

48. France and l'ji<!;lan(l literally, ol)serve, 
buy panic of each other ; they pay, each of 
them, for ten thousand-thousand pounds' worth 
of terror, a year. Now suppose, instead of 
l)uying these ten millions' worth of panic annu- 
ally, they made up their minds to be at peace 
with each other, and buy ten millions' worth of 
knowled<ije annually ; and that each nation spent 
its ten thousand-thousand pounds a year in 
founding royal libraries, royal art galleries, 
royal museums, royal gardens, and places of 
rest. Might it not be better somewhat for both 
French and lOnglish ? 

49. It will be long, yet, before that comes to 
pass. Nevertheless, I hope it will not he long 
before royal or natitmal libraries will be founded 
in every considerable city, with a royal series of 
books in them ; the same series in every one 
of them, chosen books, the best in every kind, 
l)ri'pare(l for that national scries in the most 
l)errect way i)ossible ; their text printed all on 
leaves of equal size, broad of margin, and 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. II5 

divided into pleasant volumes, light in the 
hand, beautiful, and strong, and thorough as 
examples of binders' work ; and that these 
great libraries will be accessible to all clean and 
orderly persons at all times of the day and even- 
ing ; strict law being enforced for this cleanliness 
and quietness. 

50. I could shape for you other plans, for 
art galleries, and for natural history galleries, 
and for many precious — many, it seems to me, 
needful — things; but this book plan is the 
easiest and needfulest, and would prove a con- 
siderable tonic to what we call our British Con- 
stitution, which has fallen dropsical of late, and 
has an evil thirst and evil hunger, and wants 
healthier feeding. You have got its corn laws 
repealed for it ; try if you cannot get corn 
laws established for it, dealing in a better 
bread, — bread made of that old enchanted 
Arabian grain, the sesame which opens doors — 
doors, not of robbers', but of Kings' Treasuries. 



Note to § 30. 

Respecting the increase of rent by the 
deaths of the poor, for evidence of which see 
the preface to the Medical Officer's report to the 
Privy Council, just published, there are sug- 



no SESAAfE ANn LILIES. 

jicstions in its preface which will make some 
stir among us, I fancy, respecting which let me 
note these points following : — 

There are two theories on the subject of land 
now abroad, and in contention ; both false. 

The first is, that by Heavenly law there have 
always existed, and must continue to exist, a 
certain number of hereditarily sacred persons to 
wlu)m the earth, air, and water of the world 
belong, as p.-rsonal property; of which earth, 
air, and water, these persons may, at their pleas- 
ure, permit or forbid the rest of the human race 
to eat, to breathe, or to drink. This theory is 
not for many years longer tenable. The adverse 
theory is, that a division of the land of the 
world among the mob of the world would unme- 
diately elevate the said mob into sacred person- 
ages ; that houses would then build themselves, 
and corn grow of itself; and that everybody 
would be able to live without doing any work 
for his living. This theory would also be found 
highly untenable in practice. 

It will, however, require some rough experi- 
ments and rougher catastrophes, before the 
generality of persons will be convinced that 
no law concerning anything — least of all con- 
cerning land, for either holding or dividing it, 
or renting it high, or renting it low — would be 
of the smallest ultimate use to the people, so 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 11/ 

long as the general contest for life, and for the 
means of life, remains one of mere brutal com- 
petition. That contest, in an unprincipled 
nation, will take one deadly form or another, 
whatever laws you may make against it. P^or 
instance, it would be an entirely wholesome law 
for Kngland, if it could be carried, that maxi- 
mum limits should be assigned to incomes 
acc(;rding to classes ; and that every nobleman's 
income should be paid to him as a fixed salary 
or pension by the nation, and not squeezed by 
him in variable sums, at discretion, out of the 
tenants of his land. But if you could get such 
a law passed to-morrow, and if, which would be 
further necessary, you could fix the value of the 
assigned incomes by making a given weight of 
pure bread for a given sum, a twelvemonth would 
not pass before another currency would have 
been tacitly established, and the power of ac- 
cumulated wealth would have re-asserted itself 
in some other article, or some other imaginary 
sign. There is only one cure for public dis- 
tress, and that is public education, directed 
to make men thoughtful, merciful, and just. 
There are, indeed, many laws conceivable 
which would gradually better and strengthen 
the national temper ; but, for the most part, 
they are such as the national temper must be 
much bettered before it would bear. A nation 



Il8 SESAHIE AND LILIES. 

in its youth may be helped by laws, as a weak 
child by backboards, but when it is old it 
cannot that w-ay strengthen its crooked spine. 

And besides, the problem of land, at its 
worst, is a by one ; distribute the earth as you 
will, the principal question remains inexorable, 
— Who is to dig it? Which of us, in brief 
word, is to do the hard and dirty work for the 
rest, and for what pay? Who is to do the pleas- 
ant and clean work, and for what pay? Who is 
to do no work, and for what pay? And there 
are curious moral and religious questions con- 
nected with these. How far is it lawful to suck 
a portion of the soul out of a great many per- 
sons, in order to put the abstracted physical 
quantities together and make one very beautiful 
or ideal soul? If we had to deal with mere 
blood instead of spirit (and the thing might 
literally be done, as it has been done with in- 
fants before now), so that it were possible by 
taking a certain quantity of blood from the arms 
of a given number of the mob and putting it all 
into one person, to make a more azure-blooded 
gentleman of him, the thing would of course be 
managed; but secretly, I should conceive. But 
now, because it is brain and soul that we abstract, 
not visible blood, it can be done quite openly, 
and we live, we gentlemen, on delicatest prey, 
after the manner of w^easels ; that is to say, we 



OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 1 19 

keep a certain number of clowns digging and 
ditching, and generally stupefied, in order that 
we, being fed gratis, may have all the thinking 
and feeling to ourselves. Yet there is a great 
deal to be said for this. A highly-bred and 
trained English, French, Austrian, or Italian 
gentleman (much more a lady), is a great pro- 
duction, — a better production than most statues, 
being beautifully colored as well as shaped, and 
plus all the brains ; a glorious thing to look at, 
a wonderful thing to talk to ; and you cannot 
have it, any more than a pyramid or a church, 
but by sacrifice of much contributed life. And 
it is, perhaps, better to build a beautiful human 
creature than a beautiful dome or steeple, and 
more delightful to look up reverently to a crea- 
ture far above us, than to a wall; only the 
beautiful human creature will have some duties 
to do in return, — duties of living belfry and 
rampart — of which presently. 



II. 



LECTURE 11. 

OF queens' gardens. 

Be thou glad, oh thirsting desert ; let the desert be 
made cheerful, and bloom as the lily ; and the barren 
places of Jordan shall run wild with wood. — Isaiah 
XXXV. I. (Septuagint.) 

51. It will, perhaps, be well, 'as this Lecture is 
the sequel of one previously given, that I should 
shortly state to you my general intention in both. 
The questions specially proposed to you in the 
first, namely. How and What to Read, rose out 
of a far deeper one, which it was my endeavor 
to make you propose earnestly to yourselves, 
namely, Why to Read. I want you to feel, with 
me, that whatever advantage we possess in the 
present day in the diffusion of education and of 
literature, can only be rightly used by any of us 
when we have apprehended clearly what educa- 
tion is to lead to, and literature to teach. I 
wish you to see that both well-directed moral 
training and well-chosen reading lead to the 
possession of a power over the ill-guided and 
illiterate, which is, according to the measure of 
123 



124 SESAME AND LILIES. 

it, in the truest sense kingly ] conferring indeed 
the purest kingship that am exist among men. 
Too many other kingships (however distin- 
guished by visible insignia or material power) 
being either spectral, or tyrannous ; spectral — 
that is to say, aspects and shadows only of roy- 
alty hollow as death, and which only the " like- 
ness of a kingly crown have on ; " or else 
tyrannous — that is to say, substituting their 
own will for the law of justice and love by which 
all true kings rule. 

52. There is,, then, 1 repeat (and as I want 
to leave this idea with you, I begin with it, and 
shall end with it) only one pure kind of king- 
ship, — an inevitable and eternal kind, crowned 
or not, — the kingship, namely, which consists 
in a stronger moral state and a truer thoughtful 
state than that of others, enal)ling you, there- 
fore, to guide or to raise them. Observe that 
word '* state ; '' we have got into a loose way of 
using it. It means literally the standing and 
stability of a thing; and you have the full force 
of it in the derived word " statue " — " the im- 
movable thing." A king's majesty or "state," 
then, and the right of his kingdom to be called 
a State, depends on the movelessness of both, 
— without tremor, without quiver of balance, 
established and enthroned upon a foundation of 
eternal law which nothing can alter nor over- 
throw. 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 1 25 

53. Believing that all literature and all edu- 
cation are only useful so far as they tend to con- 
firm this calm, beneficent, and therefore kingly, 
power, — first, over ourselves, and, through our- 
selves, over all around us, — I am now going to 
ask you to consider with me further, what spa- 
cial portion or kind of this royal authority, arising 
out of noble education, may rightly be possessed 
by women ; and how far they also are called to 
a true queenly power, — not in their households 
merely, but over all within their sphere. And 
in what sense, if they rightly understood and 
exercised this royal or gracious influence, the 
order and beauty induced by such benignant 
power would justify us in speaking of the terri- 
tories over which each of them reigned as 
" Queens' Gardens."' 

54. And here, in the very outset, we are met 
by a far deeper question, which — strange though 
this may seem — remains among many of us yet 
quite undecided, in spite of its infinite impor- 
tance. 

We cannot determine what the queenly power 
of women should be until we are agreed what 
their ordinary power should be. We cannot 
consider how education may fit them for any 
widely extending duty until we are agreed what 
is their true constant duty. And there never was 
a time when wilder words were spoken, or more 



126 SESAME AND LILIES. 

vain imaginntion permitted, respecting this ques- 
tion — quite vital to all social happiness. The 
relations of the womanly to the manly nature, 
their different capacities of intellect or of virtue, 
seem never to have been yet estimated with 
entire consent. We hear of the " mission " and 
of the " rights'^ of Woman, as if these could 
ever be separate from the mission and the rights 
of Man, — as if she and her lord were creatures 
of independent kind, and of irreconcilable claim. 
This, at least, is wrong. And not less wrong — 
perhaps even more foolishly wrong (for I will 
anticipate thus far what I hope to prove) — is 
the idea that woman is only the shadow and at- 
tendant image of her lord, owing him a thought- 
less and servile obedience, and supported alto- 
gether in her weakness, by the pre-eminence 
of his fortitude. 

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors 
respecting her who was made to be the helpmate 
of man. As if he could be helped effectively by 
a shadow, or worthily by a slave ! 

55. Let us try, then, whether we cannot get 
at some clear and harmonious idea (it must be 
harmonious if it is true) of what womanly mind 
and virtue are in power and office, with respect 
to man^s ; and how their relations, rightly ac- 
cepted, aid and increase the vigor and honor 
and authority of both. 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 12/ 

And now I must repeat one thing I said in the 
last lecture ; namely, that the first use of educa- 
tion was to enable us to consult with the wisest 
and the greatest men on all points of earnest 
difficulty. That to use books rightly, was to go 
to them for help ; to appeal to them when our 
own knowledge and power of thought failed ; to 
be led by them into wider sight, purer concep- 
tion, than our own, and receive from them the 
united sentence of the judges and councils of all 
time, against our solitary and unstable opinion. 

Let us do this now. Let us see whether the 
greatest, the wisest, the purest-hearted of all 
ages, are agreed in any wise on this point ; let 
us hear the testimony they have left respecting 
what they held to be the true dignity of woman, 
and her mode of help to man. 

56. And first let us take Shakespeare. 

Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has 
no heroes ; he has only heroines. There is not 
one entirely heroic figure in all his plays, except 
the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated 
for the purposes of the stage ; and the still 
slighter Valentine in " The Two Gentlemen of 
Verona." In his labored and perfect plays you 
have no hero. Othello would have been one if 
his simplicity had not been so great as to leave 
him the prey of every base practice round him ; 
but he is the only example even approximating 



128 SESAME AND LILIES. 

to the heroic type. Coriolanus, Ca\sar, Antony, 
stand in flawed strength, and foil by their vani- 
ties ; Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily specula- 
tive ; Romeo, an impatient boy ; the Merchant 
of Venice, languidly submissive to adverse for- 
tune ; Kent, in " King Lear," is entirely noble 
at heart, but too rough and unpolished to be of 
true use at the critical time, and he sinks into 
the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less 
noble, is yet the despairing toy of Chance, fol- 
lowed, comforted, saved, by Rosalind. Whereas 
there is hardly a play that has not a perfect 
woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and error- 
less purpose; Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, 
Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, 
Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and 
perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless ; con- 
ceived in the highest heroic type of humanity. 

57. Then observe, secondly. 

The catastrophe of every play is caused 
always by the folly or fault of a man ; the re- 
demption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and 
virtue of a woman, and foiling that, there is 
none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing 
to his own want of judgment, liis impatient 
vanity, his misunderstanding of his children; 
the virtue of his one true daughter would have 
saved him from all the injuries of the others, 
unless he had cast her away from him ; as it is, 
she all but saves him. 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. I 29 

Of Othello I need not trace the tale ; nor the 
one weakness of his so mighty love ; nor the in- 
feriority of his perceptive intellect to that even 
of the second woman character in the play, the 
Emilia who dies in wild testimony against his 
error : — 

" O murderous coxcomb! what should such a fool 
Do with so good a wife? " 

In "Romeo and Juliet," the wise and brave 
stratagem of the wife is brought to ruinous issue 
by the reckless impatience of her husband. In 
*' Winter's Tale," and in " Cymbeline," the hap- 
piness and existence of two princely households, 
lost through long years, and imperilled to the 
death by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, 
are redeemed at last by the queenly patience and 
wisdom of the wives. In "Measure for Meas- 
ure," the foul injustice of the judge and the foul 
cowardice of the brother are opposed to the vic- 
torious truth and adamantine purity of a woman. 
In " Coriolanus," the mother's counsel, acted 
upon in time, would have saved her son from all 
evil ; his momentary forgetfulness of it is his 
ruin. Her prayer, at last granted, saves him — 
not, indeed, from death, but from the curse of 
living as the destroyer of his country. 

And what shall I say of Julia, constant against 
the fickleness of a lover who is a mere wicked 



I30 SESAME AND LILIES. 

child? — of Helena, against the petulance and 
insult of a careless youth ? — of the patience of 
Hero, the passion of Beatrice, and the calmly 
devoted wisdom of the " unlessoned girl," who 
appears among the helplessness, the blindness, 
and the vindictive passions of men, as a gentle 
angel, bringing courage and safety by her pres- 
ence, and defeating the worst malignities of 
crime by what women are fancied most to fail 
in, — precision and accuracy of thought ? 

58. Observe, further, among all the principal 
figures in Shakespeare's plays there is only one 
weak woman — Ophelia ; and it is because she 
fails Hamlet at the critical moment, and is not, 
and cannot in her nature be a guide to him when 
he needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe 
follows. Finally, though there are three wicked 
women among the principal figures. Lady Mac- 
beth, Regan, and Goneril, they are felt at once 
to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of 
life ; fatal in their influence also, in proportion 
to the power for good which they have aban- 
doned. 

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's testi- 
mony to the position and character of women in 
human life. He represents them as infallibly 
faithful and wise counsellors, — incorruptibly 
just and pure examples, — strong always to sanc- 
tify, even when they cannot save. 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. I31 

59. Not as in any wise comparable in knowl- 
edge of the nature of man, — still less in his 
understanding of the causes and courses of fate, 
— but only as the writer who has given us the 
broadest view of the conditions and modes of 
ordinary thought in modern society, I ask you 
next to receive the witness of Walter Scott. 

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings 
as of no value ; and though the early romantic 
poetry is very beautiful, its testimony is of no 
weight, other than that of a boy's ideal. But 
his true works, studied from Scottish life, bear 
a true witness ; and in the whole range of these, 
there are but three men who reach the heroic 
typei — Dandie Dinmont, Rob Roy, and Claver- 
house ; of these, one is a border farmer ; another 
a free-booter ; the third a soldier in a bad cause. 
And these touch the ideal of heroism only in 
their courage and faith, together with a strong, 
but uncultivated or mistakenly applied intellect- 
ual power ; while his younger men are the gen- 

1 I ought, in order to make this assertion fully understood, to 
have noted the various weaknesses which lower the ideal of other 
great characters of men in the Waverley novels, — the selfishness 
and narrowness of thought in Redgauntlet, the weak religious 
enthusiasm in Edward (ilendinning, and the like ; and I ought 
to have noticed that there are several quite perfect characters 
sketched sometimes in the backgrounds ; three — let us accept 
joyously this courtesy to England and her soldiers — are Eng- 
lish officers : Colonel Gardiner, Colonel Talbot, and Colonel 
Mannering. 



132 SESAME AND LILIES. 

tlcmanly playthings of fantastic fortune, and only 
by aid (or accident) of that fortune, survive, not 
vanquish, the trials they involuntarily sustain. 
Of any disciplined or consistent character, earn- 
est in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing 
with forms of hostile evil, definitely challenged 
and resolutely subdued, there is no trace in his 
conceptions of young men. Whereas, in his 
imaginations of women, — in the characters of 
Ellen Douglas, of Flora Maclvor, Rose Brad- 
wardine, Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias 
Redgauntlet, Alice Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and 
Jeanie Deans. — with endless varieties of grace, 
tenderness, and intellectual power, we find in all 
a quite infallible sense of dignity and justice ; a 
fearless, instant, and untiring self-sacrifice to 
even the appearance of duty, much more to its 
real claims ; and finally, a patient wisdom of 
deeply-restrained aftection, which docs infinitely 
more than protect its objects from a momentary 
error; it gradually forms, animates, and exalts 
the characters of the unworthy lovers, until at 
the close of the tale, we are just able, and no 
more, to take patience in hearing of their un- 
merited success. 

So that in all cases, with Scott as with Shake- 
speare, it is the woman who watches over, 
teaches, and guides the youth ; it is never, by 
any chance, the youth who watches over or 
educates his mistress. 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 1 33 

60. Next take, though more briefly, graver 
testimony, — that of the great Italians and 
Greeks. You know well the plan of Dante's 
great poem — that it is a love-poem to his dead 
lady ; a song of praise for her watch over his 
soul. Stooping only to pity, never to love, she 
yet saves him from destruction — .saves him from 
hell. He is going eternally astray in despair; 
she comes down from heaven to his help, and 
throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, 
interpreting for him the most difficult truths, 
Divine and human, and leading him, with rebuke 
upon rebuke, from star to star. 

I do not insist upon Dante's conception ; if I 
began I could not cease ; besides, you might 
think this a wild imagination of one poet's heart. 
So I will rather read to you a few verses of the 
deliberate writing of a knight of Pi.sa to his liv- 
ing lady, wholly characteristic of the feeling of 
all the noblest men of the thirteenth or early 
fourteenth century, preserved among many other 
such records of knightly honor and love, which 
Dante Rossetti has gathered for us from among 
the early Italian poets. 

" For lo ! thy law is passed 
That this my love should manifestly be 

To serve and honor ihee : 
And so I do; and my delight is full, 
Accepted for the servant of thy rule. 



134 SESAME AX/y LILIES. 

•' Without almost, 1 am all rapturous, 

Since thus my will was sot: 
To servo, thou ll(>wer of joy, thine excellence; 
Nor ever seems it nnythinq; eouUl rouse 

A pain or a regret. 
Tnit on thee dwells my every thoUi;ht and sense; 
C'onsideriui; that from thee all virtues spread 

As from a fouutaii\ head, — 
y '//.// /'// thy ^ijt is u'isi/om's /us/ ,r:\ji/, 

AnJ honor ivi/hon/ fail : 
With whom each sovereign t;;ood dwells separate, 
l'"ullilling the perfection of thy state. 

" Lady, since I conceived 
Thy iileasurable aspect in my heart, 

J/r ///<* /liis /'icn a/'ijrt 
In shining^ />ri^/i/nt'ss and /h<' />/atr of /ruth ; 

Wliich till that time, good sooth, 
Ci roped among shadows in a darkened place, 

Where many hours and days 
It hardly ever had remembered good. 

lUit now my servitude 
Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. 

A man from a wild beast 
Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived." 

6i. Vou tiiay think, perhaps, a (^iieek knight 
would have had a lower est iniato of women than 
this Christian lover. His sjiiritual subjection to 
them was indeed not so absolute ; but as regards 



OF QUEENS' CAN J) ENS. I 35 

tlicir own personal chanictcr, it was only because 
you could n(;t have followed me so easily, that I 
(lid not take the (Jreek women instead of Shake- 
s|)eare's; and instance, for chief ideal types of 
human beauty and faith, the simple mother's and 
wife's heart of Andromache ; the divine yet re- 
jected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful kind- 
ness and simjjle princess-life of happy Nausicaa; 
the housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with 
its watch upon the sea ; the ever patient, fear- 
less, hojjelcssiy devoted piety of the sister and 
dau^^hter, in Antigone; the bowing down of 
Iphigenia, laml;-like and silent; and finally, the 
expectation of the resurrection, made clear to 
the soul of the Greeks in the return from her 
grave of that Alcestis, who, to save her husband, 
had passed calmly through the bitterness of 
death. 

62. Now 1 could multiply witness upon wit- 
ness of this kind upon you if I had time. I 
would take Chaucer, and show you why he wrote 
a Legend of (iood Women, but no Legend of 
(iood Men. I would take Spenser, and show 
you how all his fairy knights are sometimes de- 
ceived and sometimes vanquished ; but the soul 
of Una is never darkened, and the spear of iirit- 
omart is never broken. Nay, I could go back 
into the mythical teaching of the most ancient 
times, and show you how the great people, — by 



36 SESAME AND LILIES. 



one of whose princesses it was appointed that 
the hiwgiver of all the earth should be educated, 
rather than by his own kindred, — how that great 
Egyptian people, wisest then of nations, gave to 
their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a woman, and 
into her hand, for a symbol, the weaver's shut- 
tle ; and how the name and form of that spirit, 
adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks, 
became that Athena of the olive-helm and cloudy 
shield, to fliith in whom you owe, down to this 
date, whatever you hold most precious in art, in 
literature, or in types of national virtue. 

63. But I will not wander into this distant 
and mythical element ; I will only ask you to 
give its legitimate value to the testimony of 
these great poets and men of the world, — con- 
sistent as you see it is, on this head. I will ask 
you whether it can be supposed that these men, 
in the main work of their lives, are amusing 
themselves with a fictitious and idle view of the 
relations between man and woman ; nay, worse 
than fictitious or idle — for a thing may be ima- 
ginary, yet desirable, if it were possible ; but this, 
their ideal of woman, is, according to our com- 
mon idea of the marriage relation, wholly unde- 
sirable. The woman, we say, is not to guide, 
nor even to think for herself. The man is 
always to be the wiser ; he is to be the thinker, 
the ruler, the superior in knowledge and discre- 
tion, as in power. 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 1 37 

64. Is it not somewhat important to make up 
our minds on this matter? Are all these great 
men mistaken or are we? Are Shakespeare and 
y^schylus, Dante and Homer, merely dressing 
dolls for us ; or worse than dolls, unnatural vis- 
ions, the realization of which, were it possible, 
would bring anarchy into all households and 
ruin into all affections? Nay, if you can sup- 
pose this, take lastly the evidence of facts given 
by the human heart itself. In all Christian ages 
which have been remarkable for their purity 
of progress, there has been absolute yielding of 
obedient devotion, by the lover to his mistress. 
I say obedient, — not merely enthusiastic and 
worshipping in imagination, but entirely subject, 
receiving from the beloved woman, however 
young, not only the encouragement, the praise, 
and the reward of all toil, but so far as any 
choice is open, or any question difficult of decis- 
ion, the direction of all toil. That chivalry, — 
to the abuse and dishonor of which are attribut- 
able primarily whatever is cruel in war, unjust 
in peace, or corrupt and ignoble in domestic 
relations, and to the original purity and power 
of which we owe the defence alike of faith, of 
law, and of love, — that chivalry, I say, in its 
very first conception of honorable life, assumes 
the subjection of the young knight to the com- 
mand — should it even be the command in 



138 SESAME AND LILIES. 

caprice — of his lady. It assumes this because 
its masters knew that the first and necessary 
impulse of every truly taught and knightly heart 
is this of blind service to its lady ; that where 
that true faith and captivity are not, all wayward 
and wicked passion must be ; and that in this 
rapturous obedience to the single love of his 
youth, is the sanctification of all man's strength, 
and the continuance of all his purposes. And 
this, not because such obedience would be safe 
or honorable, were it ever rendered to the 
unworthy, but because it ought to be impossible 
for every noble youth — it is impossible for 
every one rightly trained — to love any one 
whose gentle counsel he cannot trust, or whose 
prayerful command he can hesitate to obey. 

65. I do not insist by any further argument 
on this ; for I think it should commend itself at 
once to your knowledge of what has been, and 
to your feeling of what should be. You cannot 
think that the buckling on of the knight's armor 
by his lady's hand was a mere caprice of roman- 
tic fashion. It is the type of an eternal truth : 
that the soul's armor is never well set to the 
heart unless a woman's hand has braced it ; and 
it is only when she braces it loosely that the 
honor of manhood fails. Know you not those 
lovely lines — I would they were learned by all 
youthful ladies of England, — 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 1 39 

** Ah, wasteful woman ! — she who may 
On her sweet self set her own price, 
Knowing he cannot choose but pay, 
How has she cheapened Paradise ! 
How given for nought her priceless gift, 
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine, 
"Which spent with due respective thrift. 
Had made brutes men, and men divine ! " ^ 

66. Thus much, then, respecting the relations 
of lovers I believe you will accept. But what we 
too often doubt is the fitness of the continuance 
of such a relation throughout the whole of human 
life. We think it right in the lover and mistress, 
not in the husband and wife. That is to say, we 
think that a reverent and tender duty is due to 
one whose affection we still doubt, and whose 
character we as yet do but partially and distantly 
discern ; and that this reverence and duty are to 
be withdrawn when the affection has become 
wholly and limitlessly our own, and the char- 
acter has been sifted and tried that we fear not 
to entrust it with the happiness of our lives. 
Do you not see how ignoble this is, as well as 
how unreasonable ? Do you not feel that mar- 

1 Coventry Patmore. You cannot read him too often or too 
carefully ; as far as I know, he is the only living poet who 
always strengthens and purifies ; the others sometimes darken, 
and nearly always depress and discourage, the imagination they 
deeply seize. 



I40 SJtSJMK AXD LILIES. 

iia,i;e. Nvhon it is marriage at all. is only the seal 
which marks the vowed transition of temporary 
into untiring service, and of fitful into eternal 
love? 

67. lUit how, you will ask, is the idea of this 
guiding function of the woman reconcilable w'ith 
a true wifely subjection? Simply in that it is a 
j^u/if/;iji^, not a determining, function. Let me 
try to show you briefly how these powers seem 
to be rightly distinguishable. 

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in 
speaking oi' the " superiority " of one sex to the 
other, as if they could he compared in similar 
things. Each has what the other has not ; each 
completes the other, and is completed by the 
other. They are in nothing alike, and the hap- 
piness and perfection of both depends on each 
asking and receiving from the other what the 
other only can give. 

68. Now their separate characters are briefly 
these. The man's power is active, progressive, 
defensive. He is eminently the doer, the crea- 
tor, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect 
is for speculation and invention ; his energy for 
adventure, for war. and for conquest, wherever 
war is iust. wherever conipiost necessary. But 
the woman's power is for rule, not tor battle : 
and her intellect is not for invention or creation, 
but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decis- 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. I4I 

ion. She sees tlie qualities of things, their 
claims, and their places. Her great function is 
praise ; she enters into no contest, but infallibly 
adjudges the crown of contest. By her office 
and place, she is protected from all danger and 
temptation. The man, in his rough work in the 
open world, must encounter all peril and trial, — 
to him therefore must be the failure, the offence, 
the inevitable error ; often he must be wounded 
or subdued ; often misled ; and always hard- 
ened. But he guards the woman from all this ; 
within his house as ruled by her, unless she 
herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no 
temptation, no cause of error or offence. This 
is the true nature of home — it is the place of 
peace ; the shelter, not only from all injury, but 
from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far 
as it is not this, it is not home ; so far as the 
anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and 
the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, 
or hostile society of the outer world is allowed 
by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, 
it ceases to be home ; it is then only a part of 
that outer world which you have roofed over and 
lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred 
place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth 
watched over by household gods, before whose 
faces none may come but those whom they can 
receive with love, — so far as it is this, and roof 



142 SESAME AND LILIES. 

and fire are types only of a nobler shade and 
light, shade as of the rock in a weary land, and 
light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea, — so far 
it vindicates the name and fulfils the praise of 
home. 

And wherever a true wife comes, this home is 
always round her. The stars only may be over 
her head, the glow-worm iii the night-cold grass 
may be the only fire at her foot, but home is yet 
wherever she is ; and for a noble woman it 
stretches far round her, better than ceiled with 
cedar or painted with vermilion, shedding its 
quiet light far, for those who else were homeless. 

69. This, then, I believe to be, — will you not 
admit it to be? — the woman's true place and 
power. But do not you see that to fulfil this, 
she must — as far as one can use such terms of 
a human creature — be incapable of error.? So 
far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. 
She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good, 
instinctively, infallibly wise, — wise not for self- 
development, but for self-renunciation ; wise, 
not that she may set herself above her husband, 
but that she may never fail from his side ; wise, 
not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless 
pride, but with the passionate gentleness of an 
infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, 
modesty of service — the true changefulness 
of woman. In that great sense, "La donna tb 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 1 43 

mobile," not " qual pium' al vento ; " no, nor 
yet " Variable as the shade by the light quiver- 
ing aspen made ; " but variable as the light, 
manifold in fair and serene division that it may 
take the color of all that it falls upon, and exalt it. 

70. I have been trying, thus far, to show you 
what should be the place, and what the power, 
of woman. Now, secondly, we ask, What kind 
of education is to fit her for these? 

And if you indeed think this a true conception 
of her office and dignity, it will not be difficult 
to trace the course of education which would fit 
her for the one and raise her to the other. 

The first of our duties to her — no thoughtful 
persons now doubt this — is to secure for her' 
such physical training and exercise as may con- 
firm her health and perfect her beauty ; the 
highest refinement of that beauty being unat- 
tainable without splendor of activity and of deli- 
cate strength. To perfect her beauty, I say, 
and increase its power ; it cannot be too power- 
ful, nor shed its sacred light too far; only re- 
member that all physical freedom is vain to 
produce beauty without a corresponding freedom 
of heart. There are two passages of that poet, 
who is distinguished, it seems to me, from all 
others, — not by power but by exquisite right- 
ness, — which point you to the source, and de- 
scribe to you in a few syllables, the completion 



144 sesj.uk ./.\v> lilies. 

of womanly beauty. I will read the introductory 
stanzas, but the last is the one I wish you 
specially to notice : — 

*' Three years she grew in sun and shower. 
Then Nature said, ' A lovelier llower 

On earth was never sown. 
This child I to myself will take; 
She shall he mine, and I will make 

A lady of my own. 

*' ' Myself will to my darlini^ be 

Both law and impulse; ami with me 

The girl, in rock and plain, 
In earth and hoavon, in glade and bower. 
Shall feel an ovei-seeing power. 
To kindle or restrain. 

** ' The floating clouds their state shall lend 
To her, for her Ihc willow bend; 

Nor shall she fail to see 
Even in the motions of the storm, 
Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 

l?y silent sympathy. 

«♦ • And vital f'^Iuigs of delight 

Shall rear her form to stately height, 

Her virgin bosom swell. 
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give. 
While she and I together live, 

Here in this happy dell.' " ^ 

' Observe, it is Nature who is speaking throughout, and who 
says. " While sl\e and I together live." 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 1 45 

•' Vital feeling of delight," observe. There 
are deadly feelings of delight ; but the natural 
ones are vital, necessary to very life. 

And they must be feelings of delight, if they 
are to be vital. Do not think you can make a 
girl lovely, if you do not make her happy. There 
is not one restraint you put on a good girl's 
nature, there is not one check you give to her 
instincts of affection or of effort, which will not 
be indelibly written on her features, with a hard- 
ness which is all the more painful because it 
takes away the brightness from the eyes of 
innocence, and the charm from the brow of 
virtue. 

71. This for the means; now note the end. 
Take from the same poet, in two lines, a perfect 
description of womanly beauty, — 

** A countenance in which did meet 
Sweet records, promises as sweet." 

The perfect loveliness of a woman's coun- 
tenance can only consist in that majestic peace 
which is founded in the memory of happy and 
useful years, full of sweet records ; and from the 
joining of this with that yet more majestic child- 
ishness, which is still full of change and prom- 
ise, — opening always — modest at once, and 
bright, with hope of better things to be won, 
and to be bestowed. There is no old age where 
there is still that promise. 



\.\6 .sA\v. /.!//; .7.\7) /.//.//:s. 

7^. Thus. thon. you h.ivo tu'st tv> i^\ouUi lior 
plusical tV.nuo. .\iul thou, as tho snvui;th she 
i;aius will ponnit \ou. tv^ (ill .luvl toiupor hor 
luiuil with .ill ki\v>\\lovl!;o A\u\ tluuij;hts which 
tvM\il to oouiiiu\ its u.Uuiwl iustiucts o\' justice, 
auil lotiuo its n.itural tact o\ lovo. 

All such kuowlciliio shvniKl bo i;i\ ou hor .is 
n\.iy otuiMo hor to uiulorstautl. aiul ovou to aid. 
tho work v^t" men; ami yot it shouhl bo s^ivou. 
not .is kuowlodii'O, — not .is it it woto. v>r CvuiKl 
bo. tor hor an object to know, but onl\ to tool, 
and to jvuli^o. It is v^t" no inoniont. .is .i luattov 
i^t' |Mido or portVctnoss in horsolt". whether she 
knows many langu.iiios or one; but it is ot" the 
utmost, th.it she should be able to show kind- 
ness tv^ .1 stranger, and to understand the sweet- 
ness ot" .\ sti.iu>;oi\s toui^uo. It is ot no momont 
to her own worth or dii^uity that she should bo 
acvjuaintod with this science or that ; but it is o( 
the highest that she should be trained in h.ibits 
of accurate thouj;ht ; that she slu>uld understand 
the mo.inim;. the inovitableness. .lud the love- 
liness ot" n.itur.il laws ; and tv^llow .it lo.ist svMue 
iMio p.ith v>t" .scientitic att.unmont as tar as tv^ the 
threshold ot* that bitter valley ot" humiliation, 
into which only the wisest and bravest ot" n\en 
can descend, owninj^' themselves torover chiUlron. 
ii.ithoriui;" pebbles on a boundless sIumo. It is 
ot" little consoiiuonco how many invsitions o( 



()/' Of//;/'.//:.' <.a/:/j/'.n::. \a,7 

citicM nhe known, or how many clatcH of evcnU, 
or narn'rH of celcbratcri pcrnonn — it in not the 
ol;j(;ct of education to turn the woman into a 
dictionary ; hut it i» dee)Jy nece»»ary that nhe 
should he tau^^ht to enter with her whole person- 
ality into the history she reads; to picture the 
passa^^es of it vitally in her own hri^^ht irna^^ina- 
tion ; to apprehend, with her fine instincts, the 
pathetic circufnstance-t and dramatic relations, 
which the historian too often only eclipses by 
h»s rcasonin;^, and disconnects by his arrange- 
ment ; it in \i)X her to trace the liidden equitie* 
of Oivine reward, and catch si;4ht, throii;(h the 
darkness, of the fateful threads of woven fire 
that connect error with retribution, iiut chiefly 
of all, she is to be taught to extend the limits of 
h'.;r sympathy with respect to that history which 
is being forever determined as the moments pass 
in wliich she draws her peaceful breath, and to 
the contemporary calamity, which, were it but 
rightly mourned by lier, would recur no more 
hereafter. She is to exercise herself in imagin- 
ing what would be the effects upon her mind 
;ifi'l f,onr|ijct, if she were daily l>rf>ught into the 
presence of the suffering which is not the less 
real because shut from her sight. She is to be 
taught somewhat to und-rstanfi the nf>tl)ingness 
of the pro|;ortif>t) whir;li that little world in which 
she lives aufl h^ves, bears to the v/orld in which 



I4S SESAME AND L/L/F.S. 

God li\cs and loves; and solemnly she is to be 
taught to strive that her thoughts of piety may 
not be feeble in proportion to the number they 
embrace, nor her prayer more languid than it 
is for the nu)mentary relief frt)m pain of her hus- 
band or her child, when it is uttered for the mul- 
titudes o( those who have none to love them, 
antl is " for all who aie desolate and oppressed." 
yT,. Thus far, 1 think, I have had your con- 
currence ; perhaps you will not be with me in 
what I believe is most needful for me to say. 
There /,v one ilangerous science for women, — 
one which they must indeeil beware how they 
])rofanely touch, — that of theol(\gy. Strange, 
and miserably strange^ that while they are mod- 
est enough to doubt their powers, and pause at 
the threshold of sciences where every step is 
demonstrable and sure, they will i>lunge head- 
king, anil without one thought oi incompetency, 
into that science in which the greatest men have 
tremi)led, and the wisest erred. Strange, that 
they will complacently and pridefully bind up 
whatever vice or folly there is in them, what- 
ever arrogance, jietulauce, or blind iucompre- 
hensiveness, into one bitter bundle of conse- 
crated mvrrh. Strange in creatuies born to be 
Love visible, that where thev can know least, 
they will condemn tirst, and think to recom- 
mend themselves to their Master, by crawling 



01' QUEKNS' GARDENS. 1 49 

up the steps of His JLid^^ment-throne, to divide 
it with ilim. Stran;/est of ail, that they should 
tliini< tliey were led by the Spirit of the Com- 
f(jrter into habits of mind wliich iiave become 
in tliem the unmixed elements of home discom- 
fort •, and that they dure to turn the household 
<<ods of Christianity into ugly idols of their 
own, — spiritual dolls for them to dress accord- 
ing to their caprice, and from which their hus- 
bands must turn away in grieved contempt, lest 
they siiould be shrieked at for breaking them. 

74. I believe, then, with this excejjtion, that a 
girl's education should be nearly, in its course 
and material of study, the same as a boy's ; but 
quite differently directed. A woman in any rank 
of life, ought to know whatever her husband is 
likely to know, but to know it in a different way. 
His command of it should be foundational and 
progressive ; hers, general and accomplished for 
daily and helpful use. Not that it would often 
be wiser in men to learn things in a womanly 
sort of way, for i>resent use, and to seek for the 
discipline and training of their mental powers 
in such branches of study as will be afterwards 
fitted for social service. But speaking broadly, 
a man ought to know any language or science 
he learns, thoroughly; while a woman ought to 
know the same language or science only so far 
as may enable her to sympathize in her husband\s 
l^leasures, and in those of his best friends. 



150 SESAME AND LILIES, 

75. Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy as 
far as slie reaches. There is a wide difference 
between elementary knowledge and superficial 
knowledge — between a firm beginning, and an 
infirm attempt at compassing. A woman may 
always help her husband by what she knows, 
however little ; by what she half-knows, or mis- 
knows, she will only tease him. 

And indeed if there were to be any difference 
between a girfs education and a boy's, I should 
say that of the two the girl should be earlier led, 
as her intellect ripens faster, into deep and se- 
rious subjects, and that her range of literature 
should be, not more, but less frivolous, — calcu- 
lated to add the qualities of patience and serious- 
nesjs to her natural poignancy of thought and 
quickness of wit, and also to keep her in a lofty 
and pure element of thought. 1 enter not now 
into any question of choice of books ; only let us 
be sure that her books are not heaped up in her 
lap as they fall out of the package of the circu- 
lating library, wet with the last and lightest 
spray of the fountain of folly. 

76. Or even of the fountain of wit ; for with 
respect to the sore temptation of novel reading, 
it is not the badness of a novel that we should 
dread so much as its overwrought interest. The 
weakest romance is not so stupefying as the lower 
forms of religious exciting literature, and the 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 151 

worst romance is not so corrupting as false his- 
tory, false pliilosophy, or false political essays. 
But the best romance becomes dangerous, if by 
its excitement it renders the ordinary course of 
life uninteresting, and increases the morbid thirst 
for useless acquaintance with scenes in which 
we shall never be called upon to act. 

']'] . I speak, therefore, of good novels only, 
and our modern literature is particularly rich in 
types of such. Well read, indeed, these books 
have serious use, being nothing less than treatises 
on moral anatomy and chemistry ; studies of 
human nature in tlie elements of it. But I 
attach little weight to this function ; they are 
hardly ever read with earnestness enough to 
permit them to fulfil it. The utmost they usu- 
ally do is to enlarge somewhat the charity of a 
kind reader, or the bitterness of a malicious one ; 
for each will gather from the novel food for her 
own disposition. Those who are naturally proud 
and envious will learn from Thackeray to despise 
humanity ; those who are naturally gentle, to pity 
it ; those who are naturally shallow, to laugh at 
it. So, also, there might be a serviceable power 
in novels to bring before us in vividness a human 
truth which we had before dimly conceived ; but 
the temptation to picturesqueness of statement 
is so great that often the best writers of fiction 
cannot resist it ; and our views are rendered so 



152 SESA.UE A A'/) LILIES. 

violent and one-sided that their vitality is rather 
a harm than good. 

j'S. Without. h()\ve\er, venturing here on any 
attcni])t at decision lu)\v much novel reading 
should be allowed, let nie at least clearly assert 
this, that whether novels or poetry or history be 
reatl, they should be chosen, not for their free 
doin from evil, but for their possession of good. 
Tiie chance and scattered evil that may here and 
there haunt, or hide itself in, a powerfid book, 
never does any harm to a noble girl; but the 
emptiness of an author oppresses her, and his 
amiable folly degrades her. And if she can 
have access to a good library of old and classi- 
cal books, there need be no choosing at all. 
Keep the modern magazine and novel out of 
your girl's \va\- ; turn her loose into the old li- 
brarv ever\- chiy, and let her alone. She will 
find what is good for her; you cannot ; for there 
is just this dilference between the making of the 
girl's character and a boy's : you may chisel a 
bo\- into shape, as \oii would a i\>ck, or hammer 
him into it. if he be of a better kind, as you 
would. I piece of bronze ; but you cannot hammer 
a gill into anything. She grows as a flower does, 
— she will wither without sun; she will decay in 
her sheath as a narcissus will if you do not give 
her air enough ; she may tall and defile her head 
in dust if you leave her without help at some 



OF QUKKNS' GARDENS. I 53 

moments of her life, but you cannot fetter her ; 
she must take her own fair form and way if she 
take any, and in mind as in body, must have 
always — 

" Her household motions light and free, 
And steps of virgin liberty." 

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a 
fawn in the field. It knows the bad weed twenty 
times better than you, and the good ones too, 
and will ^at some bitter and prickly ones good 
for it which you had not the slightest thought 
would have been so. 

79. Then in art, keep the finest models before 
her, and let iier practise ; in all accomplishments 
be accurate and thorough, so as to enable her to 
understand more tiian she accomplishes. I .say 
the finest models — that is to say, the truest, 
simplest, usefullest. Note tiiose epithets ; they 
will range through all the arts. Try them in 
music, where you might think them the least 
applicable. 1 say the truest, that in which the 
notes most closely and faithfully express the 
meaning of the words, or the character of in- 
tended emotion ; again, the simplest, that in 
which the meaning and melody are attained with 
the fewest and most significant notes possible ; 
and finally, the usefullest, that music which makes 



154 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the best words most beautiful, which enchants 
them in our memories each with its own glory of 
sound, and which applies them closest to the 
heart at the moment we need them. 

80. And not only in the material and in the 
course, but yet more earnestly in the spirit of it, 
let a girl's education be as serious as a boy's. 
You bring up your girls as if they were meant 
for sideboard ornaments, and then complain of 
their frivolity. Give them the same advantages 
that you give their brothers ; appeal to the 
same grand instincts of virtue in them ; teach 
tJicni, also, that courage and truth are the 
pillars of their being. Do you think that they 
would not answer that appeal, brave and true as 
they are even now, when you know that there is 
hardly a girls' school in this Christian kingdom 
where the children's courage or sincerity would 
be thought of half so much importance as their 
way of coming in at a door ; and when the 
whole system of society, as respects the mode 
of establishing them in life, is one rotten plague 
of cowardice and imposture — cowardice, in not 
daring to let them live or love except as their 
neighbors choose ; and imposture, in bringing, 
for the purposes of our own pride, the full glow 
of the world's worst vanity upon a girl's eyes, 
at the very period when the whole happiness of 
her future existence depends upon her remaining 
undazzled "i 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. I 55 

81. And give them, lastly, not only noble 
teachings, but noble teachers. You consider 
somewhat, before you send your boy to school, 
what kind of a man the master is. Whatsoever 
kind of a man he is you at least give him full 
authority over your son, and show some respect 
to him yourself; if he comes to dine with you, 
you do not put him at a side table ; you know, 
also, that at college your child's immediate tutor 
will be under the direction of some still higher 
tutor, for whom you have absolute reverence. 
You do not treat the Dean of Christ Church or 
the Master of Trinity as your inferiors. 

But what teachers do you give your girls, and 
what reverence do you show to the teachers you 
have chosen? Is a girl likely to think her own 
conduct or her own intellect of much importance 
when you trust the entire formation of her 
character, moral and intellectual, to a person 
whom you let your servants treat with less 
respect than they do your housekeeper (as if the 
soul of your child were a less charge than jams 
and groceries), and whom you yourself think 
you confer an honor upon by letting her some- 
times sit in the drawing-room in the evening? 

82. Thus, then, of literature as her help and 
thus of art. There is one more help which she 
cannot do without, — one which alone has 
sometimes done more than all other influences 



156 SESAME AND LILIES. 

besides, — the help of wild and fair Nature. 
Hear this of the education of Joan of Arc : — 

"The education of this poor girl was mean 
according to the present standard; was ineffably 
grand according to a purer philosophic standard; 
and only not good for our age because for us it would 
be unattainable. . . . 

"Next after her spiritual advantages she owed 
most to the advantages of her situation. The foun- 
tain of Domremy was on the brink of a boundless 
forest; and it was haunted to that degree by fairies 
that the parish priest {citre) was obliged to read mass 
there once a year in order to keep them in decent 
bounds. . . . 

"But the forests of Domremy — those were the 
glories of the land; for in them abode mysterious 
powers and ancient secrets that towered into tragic 
strength. Abbeys there were, and abbey windows 
— * like Moorish temples of the Hindoos ' — that 
exercised even princely power both in Touraine and 
in the German Diets. These had their sweet bells 
that pierced the forests for many a league at matins 
or vespers, and each its own dreamy legend. Few 
enough, and scattered enough, were these abbeys, 
so as in no degree to disturb the deep solitude of the 
region; yet many enough to spead a network or 
awning of Christian sanctity over what else might 
have seemed a heathen wilderness." ^ 

1 " Joan of Arc : in reference to M. Michelet's ' History of 
France ' " (De Quincey's Works, vol. iii., p. 217.) 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. I 5/ 

Now, you cannot, indeed, have here in Eng- 
land woods eighteen miles deep to the centre ; 
but you can, perhaps, keep a fairy or two for 
your children yet if you wish to keep them. 
But do you wish it? Suppose you had each, at 
the back of your houses, a garden large enough 
for your children to play in, with just as much 
lawn as would give them room to run, — no' 
more, — and that you could not change your 
abode ; but that, if you chose, you could double 
your income or quadruple it by digging a coal 
shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the 
flower-beds into heaps of coke. Would you do 
it? I hope not. I can tell you you would be 
wrong if you did, though it gave you income 
sixty-fold instead of four- fold. 

83. Yet this is what you are doing with all 
England. The whole country is but a little 
garden, not more than enough for your children 
to run on the law^ns of if you would let them all 
run there. And this little garden you will turn 
into furnace ground, and fill with heaps of 
cinders if you can ; and those children of yours, 
not you, will suffer for it. For the fairies will 
not be all banished ; there are fairies of the fur- 
nace as of the wood, and their first gift seems to 
be " sharp arrows of the mighty ; " but their last 
gifts are "coals of juniper." 

84. And yet I cannot — though there is no 



158 .VA\SV/.l//-; ./.\7) I./l./KS. 

part ol" niv sulijiHt that 1 led more — pross this 
U[)Oii you; tor vm" inailr so httlo use ol tho 
powtM- o( Nature while wo liail it that wo shall 
hariUy Tool what wo havo lost. Just o\\ tho othor 
siilo ot tho Morsoy you ha\ \ oui Snowclon anil 
your iMonai Straits ami that niii;ht\ i;ranito rook 
boyiMul tho moors ot AnL;losoa. splomliil in its 
hoathory orost, auil loot plautoil iu thoiloopsoa, 
onoo thoui^ht i^l" as saoroil. a ilixino proiuon- 
toiy. K^okiui; wostwanl; tho lli^lyhoail. or 
lloailhuul. still uol withi>ut awo whou its roil 
li,ii'ht glares first through storm. 'I'hoso aro the 
hills, .uul thoso tho hays ami Muo iulots whioh. 
amoui; tho (Irooks. wouhl h.i\o boon alwa\s 
Knoil, alw.ns t.itotul iu iutluouoo o\\ \\\c national 
miml. Ihat Snowilon is your I'arnassus, but 
whoroaro its Musos? That Holyhoail mountain 
is your island oi .I'^ina ; but w horo is its Tomple 
to Minorva? 

S5. Sh.iU 1 roail you wh.it tho C'hristi.m 
Miuoi\a h.iil aohioxoil umlor tho shadow ol" our 
TaiiKissus up lo tho \o.u' 1S4S? lloro is a little 
aocount ol a Welsh school, lron\ inis;e j6i ot the 
Koport o\\ Wales, published by the Committee 
ot C'ounoil on I'.duc.ition. This is a sohool 
oloso to .1 town oont.unins.> 5.000 persons: — 

" 1 then called up a laii^er class, nio^t of whom 
had recently come to the school. Tlacc girls 



OF OUR ENS' GARDENS. I 59 

rf.'pf.alf:']ly rlcclarcd they had never heard of Christ, 
anfl two Uiat they had never heard of God. Two 
out of six thf>u^4it Ciirist was on earth now [they 
rnij^ht have had a worse thought perhaps], three 
knew nothing about the Crucifixion. P'our out of 
seven did not know the names of the nnonths nor the 
numljer of days in a year. They had no notion of 
addition; beyond two and two or three and three 
their minds were perfect blanks." 

O ye women of England ! from the Princess 
of that Wales to the simplest of you, do not 
think your own children can be brou;^ht into 
tlieir true fold of rest while these are scattered 
on the hills as sheep having no shepherd. And 
do not think your daughters can be trained to 
the truth of their own human beauty while the 
pleasant places which God made at once for 
their school-room and their play-ground lie 
desolate and defded. You cannot baptize them 
rightly in those inch-deep fonts of yours unless 
you baptize them also in the sweet waters which 
the great Lawgiver strikes forth forever from the 
rocks of your native land, — waters which a 
Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, 
and you worship only with pollution. You can- 
not lead your children faithfully to those narrow 
axe-hewn church-altars of yours while the dark 
azure altars in heaven — the mountains that 



l60 S/'lSAAr/'. AND LI LIES. 

suslaiii your island throne, mountains on which 
a l*a«;an would have seen the ]>ovvers of iieaveu 
rest in every wreathed cloud — remain for you 
without inscription; altars huilt, not to, hut by, 
an Unknown dod. 

XC). Thus far, then, of the naturi\ thus far of 
the teachinj;, of woman, and thus of her house- 
hold ollice, and (lueenliucss. We come now to 
our last, our widest question, — VViiat is her 
queenly oHice with respect to the State ? 

(lenerally, wc are under an impression that a 
man\s duties are public, and a woman's private. 
JUit this is not altogether so. A man has a per- 
sonal work or duty, relating:: to his own home, 
and a public work or duty, which is the expan- 
sion of the other, relating; to the State. So a 
woman has a personal work or duty, relatino^ to 
her own home, and a public work and dut\', 
which is also the exjjansion of that. 

Now, the man's work for his own liomc is, 
as has been said, to secure its maintenance, 
liro^ress, and defence ; the woman's to secure 
its order, comfort, and loveliness. 

Exi)and both these functions. The maiTs 
duty, as a member of a commonwealth, is to as- 
sist in tlie n\ainteuance, in the advance, in the 
detence of the State. Tlie woman's duty, as a 
member of the commonwealth, is to assist in 
the orderinij, in the comforting, and in the 
beautiful adornment of tlie State. 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. \C)\ 

Wliat llic man is at his own gate, defending 
it, if need be, against insult and spoil, that 
also, not in a less, jjut in a more devoted 
measure, he is to be at the gate of his country, 
leaving his home, if need be, even to the sjKjiler, 
to do his more incumbent work there. 

And, in like manner, what the woman is to 
be within her gates, as the centre of order, the 
balm of distress, and the mirror of beauty, that 
she is also to be without her gates, where order 
is more difficult, distress more imminent, loveli- 
ness more rare. 

And as within the human heart there is al- 
ways set an instinct for all its real duties, — 
an instinct which you cannot quench, but only 
warp and corrupt if you witlidraw it from its 
true purpose ; as there is the intense instinct 
of love, which rightly discijjlined maintains all 
the sanctities of life, and misdirected under- 
mines them, and must do either the one or the 
other, so there is in the human heart an inex- 
tinguishable instinct, — the love of power, which 
rightly directed maintains all the majesty of law 
and life, and misdirected wrecks them. 

87. Deep rooted in the innermost life of the 
heart of man, and of the heart of woman, God 
set it there, and God keeps it there. Vainly, 
as falsely, you blame or rebuke the desire of 
power! For Heaven's sake, and for Man's ^ 



1 62 s/':s.tj//': .ixn urjES. 

sake, ilosiro it all you c.iti. lUit n'liat jtowcr? 
Tluil is all tho iiucstion. Tower to doslroy, — 
the lion's limb, ami tho tlragon's breath? Not 
so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide, and to 
guard; power i>t" the sceptre and shield; the 
power of the royal hand that heals in touching, 
that binds the tiend, and looses the captive ; the 
throne that is founded on the rock of justice, and 
descended from only by steps of mercy. Will 
you not covet such power as this, and seek such 
throne as this, and be no more housewives, but 
queens? 

8S. It is now long since the women of 
England arrogated, universally, a title which 
once belongetl to nobility only; and having* 
once been in the habit of accepting the simple 
title of "gentlewoman." as correspondent to 
that of " gentleman," insisted on the privilege of 
assuming the title of "lady,"^ which properly 
corresponils only to the title <^i'' lortl."" 

I do not blame tluMu lor this, but only for 
their narrow motive in this. 1 would have 

i I wish there were a true order of chivalry instituted for 
ovir Eiiglish youth of certain ranks, in which both boy and girl 
sliouki receive, at a given age, their knighthood and hidyhood 
by true title ; attainable only by certain probation and trial both 
of ch.uactor and accon\plislunont ; and to be forfeited on con- 
viction by their peers of .my dislionor.\blc .act. Such an institu- 
tion would be entirely, and with .dl noble results, possible in a 
nation which loved honor. That it would not be possible 
aniong us is not to the discredit of the scheme. 



OF QUKKNS' GARDENS. 1 63 

them desire and claim the title of "lady" 
provided they claim not merely the title, but 
the office and duty signified by it. "Lady" 
means "bread-giver" or "loaf-giver," and 
" lord " means " maintainer of laws ; " and both 
titles have reference, not to the law which is 
maintained in the house, nor to the bread which 
is given to the household, but to law maintained 
for the multitude, and to bread broken among 
the multitude. So that a Lord has legal claim 
only to his title in so far as he is the maintainer 
of the justice of the Lord of lords ; and a Lady 
lias legal claim to her title only so far as she 
communicates that help to the poor representa- 
tives of her Master, wliich women once, minister 
ing to Ilim of their substance, were permitted to 
extend lo that Master Himself; and when she 
is known, as He Himself once was, in breaking 
of Ijread. 

89. And this beneficent and legal dominion, 
tills power of the dommus, or House-Lord, and 
of the domitia, or House-Lady, is great and 
venerable, not in the number of those through 
whom it has lineally descended, but in the 
numi^er of those whom it grasps within its sway ; 
it is always regarded with reverent worship 
wherever its dynasty is founded on its duty, and 
its ambition cor-relative with its beneficence. 
Your fancy is pleased with the thought of being 



n\\. s/:s,i.)//-: A\n lilies. 

nohlo l.iilios. with .i \\.\\\\ »W" vass;\ls? Ho it S(> ; 
you iMiuu>l 1h> too i\ol)K\ and Vi>ur train cannot 
1h> too i;irat ; luit sc>t' ti> it that \oui tiain is ot" 
vassals whom \o\\ si-rw ami IochI. not niciolv 
of slavi\s who siM\o ami WwX )',',v ; and that tho 
inultitmlc whiih i>lu>\s \-ou is i)l thoso whiun 
you ha\ i> lomUu Ird. not oppressed. — w horn \ on 
ha\i' ieileiM\ied, and led into captivitw 

oo. Anil this, which is true ot' the lower (^\^ 
honscdudil dominion, is eijualh- true ot" the 
iim'euK dominion ; that hii;hest dignity is tipen 
to you il \ on will also .u'cept liiat hi^hi^st ilut\-. 
/u 1 (t f {-i^///(f — ;•<>/ ('/ f tiiti' — ** ;7V///-iloers ; " 
they ditVer but tVoin the Laily and Lord in that 
their pinver is supii nu> ovei tlu* mind as over tlic 
person; that tln-\ not onl\ I(h\1 and clothe, but 
iliiect anil teach. And whelhei- conscioush' or 
not \ou nnist be in man\' w lu\ut imUIuiuuhI. 
Theii^ is no puttiuL; by that crmxn; iiueens \ou 
nuist always be. — ciueens to yoin- lovers: 
(lueens to your husbamis and your siuis ; iineens 
t>t" higher m\steiy to the world bi>\ond. which 
bows itselt". ami will tvuexer bow. betoii^ the 
nn 1 tie ci ow n and the stainless sci^ptre ot" wonian- 
hooil. lUit. alas! \ou are too ottiui idle ami 
careless queens, i; rasping at niaiesl\' in the least 
things, w hile you alulicate it in the i;te.itest ; 
and leaving;- niisride and violence to work their 
will antoui; im-n. in ileliance ot" the power which. 



OF niJj'J'.N.'r (iAh-n/'iNS. 165 

holding Ktrai^^ht in gift from tlie Prince of all 
Peace, the wicked among you betray, and the 
good forget. 

91. "iYince of i'eace." Note that name. 
When kings rule in that name, and nobles, and 
the judges of the earth, they also in their nar- 
row place and mortal measure receive the power 
ofit. There are no otlier rulers than they; other 
rule than theirs is but mlsrnVi ; they who gov- 
ern verily ** Dei Gratia" are all princes, yes, or 
princesses, of peace. There is not a war in 
the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women 
are answerable for it ; not in that you have pro- 
voked, but in that you have not hindered. Men 
by tlieir nature are prone to fight ; they will fight 
for any cause, or for none. It is for you to 
choose their cause for them, anrl to forbid them 
when there is no cause. There is no suffering, 
no injustice, no misery in the earth, but the 
guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear the 
sight of it, but you should not l^e able to bear 
it. Men may tread it down without sympathy, 
in their own struggle; but men are feeble in 
sympathy and contracted in hope : it is you 
only who can feel the dejUhs of pain, and con- 
ceive the way of its healing. Instead of trying 
to do this, you turn away from it ; you shut 
yourselves within your j^ark walls and garden 
gates; and y(;u are content to know that tliere 



1 66 HEiiAME AND I J LIES. 

is beyond them a whole world in wilderness 

— a world of secrets which you dare not i)ene- 
trate, and t)!" suircriiii; whicli you dare not con- 
ceive. 

()Z. I (ell you llial this is to mc (luilc the most 
ania/.ini; aiuons;- the i)henonieMa oi humanity. 
I am surprised at no (lcj)ths to which, when 
once warped from its honor, that humanity can 
be de,L;rade(I. 1 do not wonder at the miser''s 
death, with his hands, as they relax, dropping 
j^old. 1 do not wonder at the sensualist^s life, 
with the shroud wrap])e(l about his feet. I do 
not wonder at the sin_L;le-handed nuu-der of a 
.single victim, (h)nc by the assassin in the (hiik- 
ness of the railway or reed-shadow of the marsh. 
1 do not even wonder at the myriad-handed 
nun(K'r of nudtitudes, done boastlully in the 
daylight by the frenzy of nations, and the im- 
measurable, unimaginable guilt, heajied up 
frcuu hell to heaven, of their ])riests and kings. 
lUit this is woncU'rfnl to nu; - - oh, liow wonderlul ! 

— to see the tender and delicate woman among 
you, with her child at her breast, and a power, 
if she wouhl wield it, over it and over its father, 
purer than the air of heaven and stronger than 
the seas of earth, — nay, a magnitmle of bless- 
ing which her husband would not i)art with {ox 
all that earth itself, though it were made of one 
entire and perfect chrvst)lite, — to see her abili- 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 1 6/ 

cate this majesty to play at precedence with her 
next-door neighbor! This is wonderful — oh, 
wonderful! — to see her, with every innocent 
feeling fresh within her, go out in the morning 
into her garden to play with the fringes of its 
guarded flowers, and lift their heads when they 
are drooping, with her ha|)py smile upon her 
face and no cloud ujjon her hrow, Ijceause there 
is a little wall around her jjlace of peace; and 
yet she knows in her heart, if she would only 
look for its knowledge, that outside of that little 
rose-covered wall, the wild grass, to the horizon, 
is torn up by the agony of men, and beat level 
by the drift of their life-blood. 

93. Have you ever considered what a deep 
under-meaning there lies, or at least may be 
read, if we choose, in our custom of strewing 
flowers before those whom we think most 
ha])i)y ? Do, you suppose it is merely to de- 
ceive them into the hope that happiness is 
always to fall thus in showers at their feet ; that 
wherever they pass they will tread on herbs of 
sweet scent, and that the rough ground will be 
made smooth for them by depth of roses? So 
surely as they believe that, they will have, in- 
stead, to walk on bitter herbs and thorns; and 
tliL- oidy softness to their feet will be of snow. 
Hut it is not thus intended they should believe; 
there is a better meanintz; in that old custom. 



1 68 SESAME AND LILIES. 

The path of a good woman is indeed strewn 
with flowers ; but they rise behind her steps, 
not before them. " Her feet have touched the 
meadows, and left the daisies rosy." 

94. You think tliat only a lover's fancy ; false 
and vain! How if it could be true? You think 
this also, perhaps, only a poet's fancy — 

" Even the light liarchell raised its head 
Elastic from her airy tread." 

But it is little to say of a woman, that she only 
does not destroy where she passes. She should 
revive ; the harebells should bloom, not stoop as 
she passes. You think I am rushing into wild 
hyperbole? Pardon me, not a whit; I mean 
what I say in calm English, spoken in resolute 
truth. You have heard it said (and I believe 
there is more than fancy even in that saying, 
but let it pass for a fanciful one) that flowers 
only flourish rightly in the garden of some one 
who loves them. I know you would like that to 
be true ; you would think it a pleasant magic if 
you could flush your flowers into brighter bloom 
by a kind look upon them ; nay, more, if your 
look had the power, not only to cheer, but to 
guard ; if you could l)id the black blight turn 
away, and the knotted caterpillar spare ; if you 
could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, 



OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 1 69 

and say to the south wind, in frost, " Come thou 
south, and breathe upon my garden, that the 
spices of it may flow out." This you would 
think a great thing. And do you think it not a 
greater thing that all this (and how much more 
than this!)you can do for fairer flowers than 
these ; flowers that could bless you for having 
blessed them, and will love you for having 
loved them ; flowers that have thoughts like 
yours and lives like yours, and which, once saved, 
you save forever? Is this only a little power? 
Far among the moorlands and the rocks, ixx in 
the darkness of the terrible streets, these feeble 
florets are lying, with all their fresh leaves torn 
and their stems broken. Will you never go 
down to them nor set them in order in their 
little fragrant beds, nor fence them, in their 
trembling, from the fierce wind ? Shall morning 
follow morning for you, but not for them ; and 
the dawn rise to watch, far away, those frantic 
dances of death, ^ but no dawn rise to breathe 
upon these living banks of wild violet and wood- 
bine and rose ; nor call to you through your 
casement, — call (not giving you the name of 
the English poet's lady, but the name of Dante's 
great Matilda, who, on the edge of happy Lethe, 
stood, wreathing flowers with flowers), saying, — 

^ See note, p. fj8, " 



I/O SKSAME AXD LILIES. 

" Come into the t;:ii\lcn, Maud, 
P'or the black bat night has flown, 
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, 
xVnd the nuisk of the roses blown? " 

Will you not go down among them, — among 
those sweet living things, whose new coufage, 
sprung from the earth with the deep color of 
heaven tipon it, is starting up in strength of 
goodly spire ; and whose purity, washed from 
the dust, is opening, bud by bud, into the flower 
of promise? And still they turn to you, and for 
you "The Larkspur listens — I hear, 1 hear! 
And the Lily whispers — I wait." 

95. Did you notice that I missed two lines 
when I read you that first stanza, and think that 
I had forgotten them? Hear them now: — 

"Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat night has flown. 
Come into the garden, Maud, 
I am here at the gate, alone." 

Who is it, think you, who stands at the gate 
of this sweeter garden alone, waiting for you? 
Did you ever hear, not of a ALuid, but a ALade- 
leine, who went down to her garden in the dawn 
and found One waiting at the gate whom she 
supposed to be the gardener? Have you not 
sought Him often; sought Him in vain all 



OF QUEKNS' GARDENS. IJl 

through the night ; sought Him in vain at the 
gate of that old garden where the fiery sword is 
set? He is never there ; but at the gate oi this 
garden He is waiting always — waiting to take 
your hand — ready to go down to see the fruits 
of the valley, to see whether the vine has flour- 
ished and the pomegranate budded. There 
you shall see with Him the little tendrils of 
the vines that His hand is guiding; there you 
shall see the pomegranate springing where His 
hand cast the sanguine seed ; more : you shall 
see the troops of the angel keepers that, with 
their wings, wave away the hungry birds from 
the pathsides where He has sown, and call to 
each other between the vineyard rows, "Take 
us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines, 
for our vines have tender grapes." Oh, you 
queens, you queens ! among the hills and happy 
greenwood of this land of yours, shall the foxes 
have holes, and the birds of the air have nests ; 
and in your cities shall the stones cry out against 
you, that they are the only pillows where the 
Son of Man can lay His head? 



III. 



LECTURE III. 

glxje miS&^^^Vi Jcrf %iU and its 

Lecture delivered in the theatre of the Royal College 
of Science, Dublin, 1868. 

96. When I accepted the privilege of address- 
ing you to-day, I was not aware of a restriction 
with respect to the topics of discussion which 
maybe brought before this Society, i — a restric- 
tion which, though entirely wise and right under 
the circumstances contemplated in its introduc- 
tion, would necessarily have disabled me, think- 
ing as I think, from preparing any lecture for 
you on the subject of art in a form which might 
be permanently useful. Pardon me, therefore, 
in so far as I must transgress such limitation ; 
for indeed my infringement will be of the letter 
— not of the spirit — of your commands. In 
whatever I may say touching the religion which 
has been the foundation of art, or the policy 
which has contributed to its power, if I offend 
one I shall offend all ; for I shall take no note 
of any separations in creeds, or antagonisms in 

1 That no reference should be made to religious questions. 



176 ^KSAMK AND LILIES. 

jKirtics ; neither do I fe;ir tliat ultimately I shall 
otteiul any by proving,' or at least stating as 
capable of positive proof, the connection of all 
that is best in the crafts and arts of man, with 
the simplicity of his faith and the sincerity of 
his patriotism. 

97. Hut I speak to you luuler another disad- 
vantage, by which I am checked in frankness 
o\ utterance, not here only, but everywhere; 
namely, that I am never fully aware how far my 
audiences are disposed to give me credit for 
real knowledge of my subject, or how far they 
grant nie attention only because I have been 
sometimes thought an ingenious or j-ileasant 
essa\ ist upon it. For I have had what, in many 
respects, I bolilly call the misfortune, to set my 
words sometimes prettily together; not without 
a foolish vault v in the poor knack that 1 had of 
doing so, until 1 was heavily punished for this 
IM-ide, bv finding that many people thought of 
the words only, and cared nothing for their 
meaning. Hapi^ily, therefore, the power of using 
such pleasant language— if indeed it ever were 
mine — is passing away from me ; and whatever 
1 am now able to sav at all, 1 find myself forced 
to sav with great plainness. For my thoughts 
have changed also, as mv wonls have; and 
whereas in earlier life what little intluence I ob- 
tained was due perhaps chietly to the enthusiasm 



OF THE MYSTERY OE LIEE. lyj 

with wliicli I was able to dwell on the beauty of 
the physical clouds, and of their colors in the 
sky; so all the influence I now desire to retain 
must be due to the earnestness with which I am 
endeavoring to trace the form and beauty of 
another kind of cloud than those, — the bright 
ch)ud of which it is written, — 

"What is your life? It is even as a vai)()r 
that appeareth for a little time, and then van- 
ishetli away." 

98. I suppose few peoj)le reach the middle or 
latter period of their age, without having, at 
some moment of change or disappointment, felt 
tlie truth of those bitter words, and been startled 
by the fading of the sunshine from the cloud of 
their life, into the sudden agony of the knowl- 
edge that the fabric of it was as fragile as a 
dream, and the endurance of it as transient as 
the dew. Ikit it is not always that, even at 
such times of melancholy surprise, we can enter 
into any true perception that this human life 
shares, in the nature of it, not only the evanes- 
cence, but the mystery of the cloud ; that its 
avenues are wreathed in darkness, and its forms 
and courses no less fantastic than spectral and 
obscure ; so that not only in the vanity which 
we cannot grasp, ])ut in the shadow which we 
cannot pierce, it is true of this cloudy life of 
ours, that " man walkcth in a vain shadow, and 
disfpiietcth himself in vain," 



178 SESAME AND LILIES. 

99. And least of all, whatever may have been 
the eagerness of our passions or the height of 
our pride, are we able to understand in its depth 
the third and most solemn character in which 
our life is like those clouds of heaven : that to 
it belongs not only their transience, not only 
their mystery, but also their power ; that in the 
cloud of the human soul there is a fire stronger 
than the lightning and a grace more precious 
than the rain ; and that though of the good and 
evil it shall one day be said alike, that the place 
that knew them knows them no more, there is 
an infinite separation between those whose brief 
presence had there been a blessing, like the 
mist of Eden that went up from the earth to 
water the garden, and those whose place knew 
them only as a drifting and changeful shade, of 
whom the Heavenly sentence is, that they are 
"wells without water; clouds that are carried 
with a tempest, to whom the mist of darkness is 
reserved forever." 

100. To those among us, however, who have 
lived long enough to form some just estimate of 
the rate of the changes which are, hour by hour 
in accelerating catastrophe, manifesting them- 
selves in the laws, the arts, and the creeds of 
men, it seems to me, that now at least, if never 
at any former time, the thoughts of the true 
nature of our life, and of its powers and respon- 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 1 79 

sibilities, should present themselves with abso- 
lute sadness and sternness. 

And although I know that this feeling is much 
deepened in my own mind by disappointment, 
which by chance has attended the greater num- 
ber of my cherished purposes, I do not for that 
reason distrust the feeling itself, though I am on 
my guard against an exaggerated degree of it : 
nay, I rather believe that in periods of new effort 
and violent change, disappointment is a whole- 
some medicine ; and that in the secret of it, as 
in the twilight so beloved by Titian, we may see 
the colors of things with deeper truth than in 
the most dazzling sunshine. And because these 
truths about the works of men, which I want to 
bring to-day before you, are most of them sad 
ones, though at the same time helpful ; and 
because also I believe that your kind Irish hearts 
will answer more gladly to the truthful expres- 
sion of a personal feeling, than to the exposition 
of an abstract principle, I will permit myself so 
much unreserved speaking of my own causes of 
regret, as may enable you to make just allowance 
for what, according to your sympathies, you 
will call either the bitterness or the insight of a 
mind which has surrendered its best hopes, and 
been foiled in its favorite aims. 

1 01. I spent the ten strongest years of my life 
(from twenty to thirty) in endeavoring to show 



l80 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the excellence of the work of the man whom I 
believed, and rightly believed, to be the greatest 
painter of the schools of England since Reynolds. 
I had then perfect faith in the power of every 
great truth or beauty to prevail ultimately, and 
take its right place in usefulness and honor ; and 
I strove to bring the painter's work into this due 
place, while the painter was yet alive. But he 
knew, better than I, the uselessness of talking 
about what people could not see for themselves. 
He always discouraged me scornfully, even when 
he thanked me ; and he died before even the 
superficial effect of my work was visible. I 
went on, however, thinking I could at least be 
of use to the public, if not to him, in proving 
his power. My books got talked about a 
little. The prices of modern pictures, generally, 
rose ; and I was beginning to take some pleasure 
in a sense of gradual victory, when, fortunately, 
or unfortunately, an opportunity of perfect trial 
undeceived me at once and forever. The trus- 
tees of the National Gallery commissioned me 
to arrange the Turner drawings there, and per- 
mitted me to prepare three hundred examples of 
his studies from Nature, for exhibition at Ken- 
sington. At Kensington they were, and are, 
placed for exhibition; but they are not exhibited, 
for the room in which they hang is always empty. 
102. Well, this showed me at once that those 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. l8l 

ten years of my life had been, in tlieir chief pur- 
pose, lost. For that, I did not so much care ; I 
had at least learned my own business thoroughly, 
and should be able, as I fondly supposed, after 
such a lesson, now to use my knowledge with 
I better effect. But what I did care for was the 
— to me frightful — discovery, that the most 
splendid genius in the arts might be permitted 
by Providence to labor and perish uselessly ; 
that in the very fineness of it there might be 
something rendering it invisible to ordinary 
eyes, but that with this strange excellence faults 
might be mingled which would be as deadly as 
its virtues were vain ; that the glory of it was 
perishable as well as invisible, and the gift and 
grace of it might be to us as snow in summer, 
and as rain in harvest. 

103. That was the first mystery of life to me. 
But while my best energy was given to the study 
of painting, I had put collateral effort, more 
prudent if less enthusiastic, into that of archi- 
tecture ; and in this I could not complain of 
meeting with no sympathy. Among several 
personal reasons which caused me to desire that 
I might give this my closing lecture on the sub- 
ject of art here in Ireland, one of the chief was, 
that in reading it, I should stand near the beau- 
tiful building — the engineers' school of your 
college — which was the first realization I had 



1 82 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the joy to see, of the principles I had, until then, 
been endeavoring to teach ; but which alas, is 
now to me no more than the richly canopied 
monument of one of the most earnest souls that 
ever gave itself to the arts, and one of my truest 
and most loving friends, Benjamin Woodward. 
Nor was it here in Ireland only that I received 
the help of Irish sympathy and genius. When 
to another friend (Sir Thomas Deane),with Mr. 
Woodward, was entrusted the building of the 
museum at Oxford, the best details of the work 
were executed by sculptors who had been born 
and trained here ; and the first window of the 
facade of the building — in which was inaugu- 
rated the study of natural science in England, in 
true fellowship with literature — was carved from 
my design, by an Irish sculptor. 

104. You may perhaps think that no man 
ought to speak of disappointment, to whom, 
even in one branch of labor, so much success 
was granted. Had Mr. Woodward now been 
beside me, I had not so spoken ; but his gentle 
and passionate spirit was cut off from the fulfil- 
ment of its purposes, and the work we did to- 
gether is now become vain. It may not be so 
in future ; but the architecture we endeavored 
to introduce is inconsistent alike with the reck- 
less luxury, the deforming mechanism, and the 
squalid misery of modern cities. Among the 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 1 83 

formative fashions of the day, aided, especially 
in England, by ecclesiastical sentiment, it in- 
deed obtained notoriety ; and sometimes behind 
an engine furnace or a railroad bank, you may 
detect the pathetic discord of its momentary 
grace, and with toil decipher its floral carvings 
choked with soot. I felt answerable to the 
schools I loved, only for their injury. I per- 
ceived that this new portion of my strength 
had also been spent in vain ; and from amidst 
streets of iron and palaces of crystal, shrunk back 
ai last to the carving of the mountain and color 
of the flower. 

105. And still I could tell of failure, and fail- 
ure repeated as years went on ; but I have tres- 
passed enough on your patience to show you, 
in part, the causes of my discouragement. Now 
let me more deliberately tell you its results. 
You know there is a tendency in the minds of 
many men, when they are heavily disappointed 
in the main purposes of their life, to feel, and 
(perhaps in warning, perhaps in mockery) to 
declare that life itself is a vanity. Because it 
has disappointed them, they think its nature is 
of disappointment always, or, at best, of pleas- 
ure that can be grasped by imagination only ; 
that the cloud of it has no strength nor fire with- 
in, but is a painted cloud only, to be delighted 
in, yet despised. You know how beautifully 



iS.j. .S7;.V.7;]//r AND LIFJES. . 

l'()l)(> has cxprcssrd this });u(icular pliase of 
Ihoiinht : _ 

" Mraiiwliilc opinion i;;ilils, wilh varying r;\ys, 
Tlicsc pninlcd clouds that l)caiitify our days; 
Each want of hajipincss hy hope supplied, 
And cacli vacuity of sense, l)y pride. 

" IIopi- l)nihls as fast as KnowU-di;!' can destroy; 
In l'"olly's cup still laughs the bubble joy. 
One pleasure past, another still we gain; 
And not a v:uiily is given in vain." 

i)Ut llie cllect ol failiiit^ upon ni\' own niiiul has 
been just tlu' reverse of this. The nioic that 
my life (lisai)point(.>il me, the more solemn and 
wondorrui it became to me. It seemed, con- 
trarily lo ]'oi)e\s sayinsjj, that the vanity of it 7f/^/.f 
indeed ^iven in vain ; but that thefc was some- 
thin,g behind the veil of it which was not vanity. 
It bccanu' to nu\ not a painted cloud, but a ter- 
rible and impenetrable one ; not a miras;e, whicli 
vanished as 1 drew near, but a pillar of darkness, 
to wltich 1 was forbidden to draw near. For I 
saw that both my own liihire, and such success 
in ])ett\' thini^s as in its i)oor tiiumj)!! seemed to 
me worse than failure, came from the want of 
sutlicienlly earnest ellort to unchMstand the whole 
law and meaniiii;- of (Existence, and to biinj; it to 
noble and due end; as, (^\\ the other hand, I 



OF 'nil': MYSTERY OF LIFE. 1 85 

saw more ;iiid inrjrc c]<;;irly that all cudnriii^^ suc- 
cess iti the arts, or in any (Hlier occupation, had 
come from the ruling of lower purposes, — not 
by a cfjnviction of liielr n(Aiiin;(ness, but by a 
solemn faith in the advancing power of human 
nature, or in the promise, liowever dimly appre- 
liended, that the mortal part of it would one day 
be swallowed u|j in immortality; and that, in- 
deed, the arts themselves never had reached any 
vital strength or honor but in the effort to pro- 
claim this immortality, and in the service either 
of great and just religion, or of some unselfish 
patriotism and law of such national life as must 
be the foundatirm of religion. 

\(/y. Nothing that I have ever said is more 
true or necessary, nothing has been more mis- 
tmderstood or misapplied, than my strong asser- 
tion that the arts can never be right themselves 
unless their motive is right. It is misunderstood 
this way : weak painters who have never learned 
their business, and cannot lay a true line, con- 
tirmally come to me, crying out, — " Look at 
this picture of mine; it must be good, I had 
such a lovely motive. I have put my whole 
heart into it, and taken years to think over its 
treatment." Well, the only answer for these 
people is — if one harl the cruelty to make it — 
" Sir, you cannot think over rt;//thing in any 
number of years, — you haven't the head to do 



1 86 SESAME AND LILIES. 

it; and though you had fine motives, strong 
enough to make you burn yourself in a slow fire 
if only first you could paint a picture, you can't 
paint one, nor half an inch of one ; you haven't 
the hand to do it.'' 

But far more decisively, we have to say to the 
men who do know their business, or may know 
it if they choose, — " Sir, you have this gift, and 
a mighty one; see that you serve your nation 
faithfully with it. It is a greater trust than ships 
and armies ; you might cast them away, if you 
were their captain, with less treason to your 
people than in casting your own glorious power 
away, and serving the devil with it instead of 
men. Ships and armies you may replace if they 
are lost; but a great intellect, once abused, is 
a curse to the earth forever." 

107. This, then, I meant by saying that the 
arts must have noble motive. This also I said 
respecting them, that they never had prospered, 
nor could prosper, but when they had such true 
purpose, and were devoted to the proclamation 
of Divine tmth or law. And yet I saw also that 
they had always failed in this proclamation — 
that poetry and sculpture and painting, though 
only great when they strove to teach us some- 
thing about the gods, never had taught us any- 
thing trustworthy about the gods, but had always 
betrayed their trust in the crisis of it, and with 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 1 8/ 

their powers at the full reach, became ministers 
to pride and to lust. And I felt also, with in- 
creasing amazement, the unconquerable apathy 
in ourselves, the hearers, no less than in these, 
the teachers ; and that while the wisdom and 
rightness of every act and art of life could only 
be consistent with a right understanding of the 
ends of life, we were all plunged as in a languid 
dream, — our heart fat and our eyes heavy and 
our ears closed, lest the inspiration of hand or 
voice should reach us ; lest we should see with 
our eyes and understand with our hearts, and be 
healed. 

io8. This intense apathy in all of us is the 
first great mystery of life ; it stands in the way 
of every perception, every virtue. There is no 
making ourselves feel enough astonishment at 
it. That the occupation or pastimes of life 
should have no motive, is understandable ; but 
that life itself should have no motive, — that we 
neither care to find out what it may lead to, nor 
to guard against its being forever taken away 
from us, — here is a mystery indeed. For just 
suppose I were able to call at this moment to 
any one in this audience by name, and to tell 
him positively that I knew a large estate had 
been lately left to him on some curious condi- 
tions ; but that, though I knew it was large, I did 
not know how large, nor even where it was — 



1 88 SESAME AND LILIES. 

whether in the East Indies or the West, or in 
England, or at the Antipodes. I only knew it 
was a vast estate, and that there was a chance 
of his losing it altogether if he did not soon find 
out on what terms it had been left to him. Sup- 
pose I were able to say this positively to any 
single man in this audience, and he knew that 
I did not speak without warrant, do you think 
that he would rest content with that vague knowl- 
edge, if it were anywise possible to obtain more? 
Would he not give every energy to find some 
trace of the facts, and never rest till he had as- 
certained where this place was, and what it was 
like? And suppose he were a young man, and 
all he could discover by his best endeavor was 
that the estate was never to be his at all, unless 
he persevered during certain years of probation, 
in an orderly and industrious life ; but that, 
according to the rightness of his conduct, the 
portion of the estate assigned to him would be 
greater or less, so that it literally depended on 
his behavior from day to day whether he got 
ten thousand a year, or thirty thousand a year, 
or nothing whatever. Would you not think it 
strange if the youth never troubled himself to 
satisfy the conditions in any way, nor even to 
know what was required of him, but lived exactly 
as he chose, and never inquired whether his 
chances of the estate were increasing or passing 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 1 89 

away? Well, you know that this is actually and 
literally so with the greater number of the edu- 
cated persons now living in Christian countries. 
Nearly every man and woman in any company 
such as this, outwardly professes to believe, — 
and a large number unquestionably think they 
believe, — much more than this ; not only that 
a quite unlimited estate is in prospect for them 
if they please the Holder of it, but that the in- 
finite contrary of such a possession — an estate 
of perpetual misery — is in store for them if they 
displease this great Land-Holder, this great 
Heaven-Holder. And yet there is not one in a 
thousand of these human souls that cares to 
think, for ten minutes of the day, where this 
estate is, or how beautiful it is, or what kind of 
life they are to lead in it, or what kind of life 
they must lead to obtain it. 

109. You fancy that you care to know this ; 
so little do you care that, probably, at this 
moment many of you are displeased with me 
for talking of the matter ! You came to hear 
about the art of this world, not about the life 
of the next, and you are provoked with me for 
talking of what you can hear any Sunday in 
church. But do not be afraid. I will tell you 
something, before you go, about pictures and 
carvings and pottery and what else you would 
like better to hear of than the other world. 



190 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Nay, perhaps you say, " We want you to talk of 
pictures and pottery because we are sure that 
you know something of them, and you know 
nothing of the other world." Well, I don't. 
That is quite true. But the very strangeness 
and mystery of which I urge you to take notice 
is in this, — that I do not — nor you either. 
Can you answer a single bold question unflinch- 
ingly about that other world? Are you sure 
there is a heaven ? Sure there is a hell ? Sure 
that men are dropping before your faces through 
the pavements of these streets into eternal fire, 
or sure that they are not? Sure that at your 
own death you are going to be delivered from all 
sorrow, to be endowed with all virtue, to be gifted 
with all felicity, and raised into perpetual com- 
panionship with a King, compared to whom the 
kings of the earth are as grasshoppers, and the 
nations as the dust of His feet? Are you sure 
of this? or, if not sure, do any of us so much 
as care to make it sure? and, if not, how can 
anything we do be right, how can anything 
we think be wise ; what honor can there be in 
the arts that amuse us, or what profit in the 
possessions that please? 

Is not this a mystery of life? 

no. But further, you may perhaps think it a 
beneficent ordinance for the generality of men, 
that they do not, with earnestness or anxiety, 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. IQI 

dwell on such questions of the future ; because 
the business of the day could not be done if this 
kind of thought were taken by all of us for the 
morrow. Be it so ; but at least we might antici- 
pate that the greatest and wisest of us, who were 
evidently the appointed teachers of the rest, 
would set themselves apart to seek out whatever 
could be surely known of the future destinies of 
their race, and to teach this in no rhetorical or 
ambiguous manner, but in the plainest and most 
severely earnest words. 

Now, the highest representatives of men who 
have thus endeavored during the Christian era 
to search out these deep things and relate them, 
are Dante and Milton. There are none who, 
for earnestness of thought, for mastery of word, 
can be classed with these. I am not at present, 
mind you, speaking of persons set apart in any 
priestly or pastoral office, to deliver creeds to us, 
or doctrines ; but of men who try to discover 
and set forth, as far as by human intellect is 
possible, the facts of the other world. Divines 
may perhaps teach us how to arrive there ; but 
only these two poets have in any powerful man- 
ner striven to discover, or in any definite words 
professed to tell, what we shall see and become 
there ; or how those upper and nether worlds 
are, and have been, inhabited. 

III. And what have they told us ? Milton's 



192 SESAME AND LILIES. 

account of the most important event in his 
whole system of the universe, the fall of the 
angels, is evidently unbelievable to himself; and 
the more so, that it is wholly founded on, and 
in a great part spoiled and degraded from, 
Hesiod's account of the decisive war of the 
younger gods with the Titans. The rest of 
his poem is a picturesque drama, in which every 
artifice of invention is visibly and consciously 
employed ; not a single fact being for an instant 
conceived as tenable by any living faith. Dante's 
conception is far more intense, and by himself, 
for the time, not to be escaped from ; it is indeed 
a vision, but a vision only, and that one of the 
wildest that ever entranced a soul, — a dream in 
which every grotesque -type or fantasy of heathen 
tradition is renewed and adorned ; and the des- 
tinies of the Christian Church, under their most 
sacred symbols, become literally subordinate to 
the praise, and are only to be understood by the 
aid, of one dear Florentine maiden. 

112. I tell you truly that as I strive more 
with this strange lethargy and trance in myself, 
and awake to the meaning and power of life, it 
seems daily more amazing to me that men such 
as these should dare to play with the most 
precious truths (or the most deadly untruths) 
by which the whole human race, listening to 
them, could be informed or deceived. All the 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 1 93 

world their audiences forever, with pleased ear 
and passionate heart ; and yet, to this submissive 
infinitude of souls, and evermore succeeding and 
succeeding multitude, hungry for bread of life, 
they do but play upon sweetly modulated pipes ; 
with pompous nomenclature adorn the councils 
of hell ; touch a troubadour's guitar to the courses 
of the suns ; and fill the openings of eternity, 
before which prophets have veiled their faces, 
and which angels desire to look into, with idle 
puppets of their scholastic imagination, and 
melancholy lights of frantic faith in their lost 
mortal love. 

Is not this a mystery of life? 

113. But more. We have to remember that 
these two great teachers were both of them 
warped in their temper, and thwarted in their 
search for truth. They were men of intellectual 
war, unable, through darkness of controversy or 
stress of personal grief, to discern where their 
own ambition modified their utterances of the 
moral law, or their own agony mingled with their 
anger at its violation. But greater men than 
these have been (innocent-hearted) too great for 
contest, — men, like Homer and Shakespeare, 
of so unrecognized personality that it disap- 
pears in future ages and becomes ghostly, like 
the tradition of a lost heathen god ; men, 
therefore, to whose unoffended, uncondemning 



194 SESAME AND LILIES. 

sight the whole of human nature reveals itself 
in a pathetic weakness with which they will not 
strive, or in mournful and transitory strength 
which they dare not praise. And all Pagan and 
Christian civilization thus becomes subject to 
them. It does not matter how little or how 
much any of us have read, either of Homer or 
Shakespeare ; everything round us, in substance 
or in thought, has been moulded by them. All 
Greek gentlemen were educated under Homer. 
All Roman gentlemen, by Greek literature. All 
Italian and French and English gentlemen by 
Roman literature, andi)y its principles. Of the 
scope of Shakespeare I will say only, that the 
intellectual measure of every man since born in 
the domains of creative thought may be assigned 
to him according to the degree in which he has 
been taught by Shakespeare. Well, what do 
these two men, centres of moral intelligence, 
deliver to us of conviction respecting what it 
most behooves that intelligence to grasp? What 
Is their hope, their crown of rejoicing? what 
manner of exhortation have they for us, or of 
rebuke? what lies next their own hearts, and dic- 
tates their undying words ? Have they any peace 
to promise to our unrest, any redemption to our 
misery. 

114. Take Homer first, and think if there is 
any sadder image of human fate than the great 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 1 95 

Homeric story. The main features in the char- 
acter of Achilles are its intense desire of justice, 
and its tenderness of affection. And in that 
bitter song of the Iliad, this man, though aided 
continually by the wisest of the gods, and 
burning with the desire of justice in his heart, 
becomes yet, through ill-governed passion, the 
most unjust of men ; and full of the deepest 
tenderness in his heart, becomes 3^t, through 
ill-governed passion, the most cruel of men. 
Intense alike in love and in friendship, he loses 
first his mistress and then his friend ; for the 
sake of the one he surrenders to death the 
armies of his own land ; for the sake of the other 
he surrenders all. Will a man lay down his 
life for his friend? Yea, even for his dead 
friend this Achilles, though goddess-born and 
goddess -taught, gives up his kingdom, his 
country, and his life ; casts alike the innocent 
and guilty, with himself, into one gulf of slaugh- 
ter, and dies at last by the hand of the basest of 
his adversaries. Is not this a mystery of life? 

115. But what, then, is the message to us of 
our own poet and searcher of hearts, after fifteen 
hundred years of Christian faith have been num- 
bered over the graves of men ? Are his words 
more cheerful than the heathen's ; is his hope 
more near, his trust more sure, his reading of 
fate more happy? Ah, no! He differs from 



• 



196 SESAME AXn LILIES. 

the heatluMi poet chictl\- in this, — that he rec- 
ognizes, l"i)r cleUver.mce, no gods nigh at hand; 
and that by i)etty cluince, by momentary folly, 
by broken message, by fool's tyranny or traitor's 
snare, the strongest and most righteous are 
brought to their ruin, and perish without word 
of hope. He, indeed, as part of his rendering 
(>{ eharacter, ascribes the power and modesty of 
habitual devotion to the gentle and the just. 
The death-bed of Katherine is bright with vision 
of angels ; and the great soldier-king, standing 
bv his few dead, acknowledges the presence of 
tl\e hand that e;iu save alike by many or by few. 
lUit obseive that tVoni those who with deepest 
spirit nieilitate. ami with deeiH\s( passion mourn, 
there are no such words as these ; nor in their 
hearts are any such consolations. Instead of 
the perpetual sense of the helpful presence of 
the Deity, which through all heathen tradition 
is the source of heroic strength, in battle, in 
exile, and in the valley of the shadow of death, 
we tind only in the great Christian poet the con- 
sciousness of a moral law, through which '* the 
gods arc just, and of our pleasant vices make 
instruments to scourge us ; " and of the resolved 
arbitration o'i the destinies, that conclude into 
precisitin oi doom what we teebly and blindly 
began ; and force us, when our indiscretion 
serves us and our deepest plots do pall, to tlie 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 1 97 

confession that " there's a divinity tluit shapes 
our ends, rough-hew them how we will.'" 

Is not this a mystery of life? 

116. Be it so, then. About this human Hfe 
that is to be, or that is, the wise religious men 
tell us nothing that we can trust ; and the wise 
contemplative men, nothing that can give us 
peace. liut there is yet a third class to whom 
we may turn, the wise practical men. We have 
sat at the feet of the poets who sang of heaven, 
and they have told us their dreams. We have 
listened to the poets who .sang of earth, and they 
have chanted to us dirges, and words of despair. 
But there is one class of men more, — men not 
capable of vision, nor sensitive to sorrow, but 
firm of purj)ose, practised in business, learned 
in all that can be (by handling) known ; men 
whose hearts and hopes are wholly in this pres- 
ent world, from whom, therefore, we may surely 
learn at least how at present conveniently to live 
in it. What will tJicy say to us, or show us by 
example, — these kings, these councillors, these 
statesmen and builders of kingdoms ; these cap- 
italists and men of business, who weigh the 
earth and the dust of it in a balance? They 
know the world surely; and what is the mystery 
of life to us, is none to them. They can surely 
show us how to live while we live, and to gather 
out of the present world what is best. 



iqS sesame and lilies. 

117. I think I can best tell you their answer 
by telHn_<; you a dream 1 had once. For thoui;h 
1 am no port I have (hoams sometimes ; 1 
dreamed 1 was at a ehiUTs May-day party, in 
which every means ()t' entertainment had been 
provideil for them by a wise anil kind host. It 
was in a stately house, with beautiful gardens 
attached to il, anil the children had been set 
flee in the rooms and s;aiilens, \\\\\\ no care 
whatever but how to pass their afteinoon rejoi- 
cin«;iy. They did not, indeed, know much about 
what was to hapi)en next day ; and some of them 
I thought were a litlle_ frightened because there 
was a chance of their being sent to a new school 
where there were examinations; but they kept 
the thoughts oi tlial out of their heads as well 
as thev could, and resoKed to enjoy themselves. 
The house, 1 said, was in a beautiful garden, 
and in the garden were all kinds of llowers ; 
sweet grassy banks for rest ; and smooth lawns 
for play ; and pleasant streams and woods ; and 
rocky places for climbing. And the children 
were happy for a little while ; but presently they 
separated themselves into parties, and then each 
party declared it would have a iiiece of the gar- 
den for its own, and that none (^'i the others 
should have an\thing to (V^ with that piece. 
Next, thev quarrelled violently which pieces 
they would have. Anil at last the boys took up 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIEE. 1 99 

the thing, as boys should do, " practically," and 
fought in the flower-beds till there was hardly a 
flower left standing ; then they trampled down 
each other's bits of the garden out of si)ite ; and 
the girls cried till they could cry no more, and 
so they all lay down at last breathless in the 
ruin, and waited for the time when they were to 
be taken home in the evening. ^ 

118. Meanwhile, the children in the house 
had been making themselves Iiappy also in their 
manner. For them there had been i)rovided 
every kind of in-doors pleasure: there was 
music for them to dance to ; and the library was 
open, with all manner of amusing books; and 
there was a museum full of the most curious 
shells and animals and birds; and there was a 
workshop, with lathes and car[)enter's tools, for 
the ingenious boys ; and there were pretty fan- 
tastic dresses for the girls to dress in ; and there 
were microscopes and kaleidoscopes and what- 
ever toys a child could fancy ; and a tabJe in the 
dining-room loaded with everything nice to eat. 

But in the midst of all this, it struck two or 
three of the more "practical" children that 
they would like some of the brass-headed nails 

' I li.ive sometimes been asked wliat this means. I intended 
it to set fortli tlie wisdom of men in war contending for king- 
doms ; and wliat follows, to set forth their wisdom in peace, 
contending for wealth. 



200 SESAME AND LILIES. 

that studded the chairs, and so they set to 
work to pull them out. Presently the others, 
who were reading or looking at shells, took a 
fancy to do the like ; and in a little while all the 
children, nearly, were spraining their fingers in 
pulling out brass-headed nails. With all that 
they could pull out they were not satisfied ; and 
then everybody wanted some of somebody else's. 
And at last the really practical and sensible ones 
declared that nothing was of any real conse- 
quence that afternoon except to get plenty of 
brass-headed nails ; and that the books and the 
cakes and the microscopes were of no use at all 
in themselves, but only if they could be ex- 
changed for nail-heads. And at last they began 
to fight for nail-heads, as the others fought for 
the bits of garden. Only here and there a de- 
spised one shrunk away into a corner, and tried 
to get a little quiet with a book in the midst of 
the noise ; but all the practical ones thought 
of nothing else but counting nail-heads all the 
afternoon, even though they knew they would 
not be allowed to carry so much as one brass 
knob away with them. But no ! it was, " Who 
has most nails ? I have a hundred and you have 
fifty ;'' or, "I have a thousand and you have 
two. I must have as many as you before I 
leave the house or I cannot possibly go home 
in peace." At last they made so much noise 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 20I 

that I awoke, and thought to myself, " What a 
false dream that is of children.'^'' The child is 
the father of the man, and wiser. Children never 
do such foolish things. Only men do. 

119. But there is yet one last class of per- 
sons to be interrogated. The wise religious 
men we have asked in vain ; the wise contem- 
plative men, in vain ; the wise worldly men, in 
vain. But there is another group yet. In the 
midst of this vanity of empty religion, of tragic 
contemplation, of wrathful and wretched am- 
bition and dispute for dust, there is yet one 
great group of persons by whom all thsse 
disputers live, — the persons who have deter- ■ 
mined, or have had it by a beneficent Providence 
determined for them, that they will do some- 
thing useful ; that whatever may be prepared for 
them hereafter, or happen to them here, they 
will at least deserve the food that God gives 
them by winning it honorably ; and that, how- 
ever fallen from the purity or far from the peace 
of Eden, they will carry out the duty of human 
dominion though they have lost its felicity ; and 
dress and keep the wilderness though they no 
more can dress or keep the garden. 

These hewers of wood and drawers of water, 
these bent under burdens or torn of scourges, 
these that dig and weave, that plant and build ; 
workers in wood, and in marble, and in iron, by 



202 SESAME AND LILIES. 

whom all food, clothing, habitation, furniture, 
and means of delight are produced, for them- 
selves and for all men besides, — men whose 
deeds are good though their words may be few ; 
men whose lives are serviceable, be they never 
so short, and worthy of honor, be they never so 
humble; from these surely at least we may 
receive some clear message of teaching, and 
pierce for an instant into the mystery of life and 
of its arts. 

I20. Yes; from these, at last, we do receive 
a lesson. But I grieve to say, or rather — for 
that is the deeper truth of the matter — I rejoice 
to say, this message of theirs can only be re- 
ceived by joining them, not by thinking about 
them. 

You sent for me to talk to you of art ; and I 
have obeyed you in coming. But the main 
thing I have to tell you is, that art must not be 
talked about. The fact that there is talk about 
it at all signifies that it is ill-done, or cannot be 
done. No true painter ever speaks, or ever has 
spoken, much of his art. The_gi:eatest speak 
nothing. Even Reynolds is no exception ; for he 
wrote of all that he could not himself do, and was 
utterly silent respecting all that he liimself did. 

The moment a man can really do his work 
he becomes speechless about it. All words 
become idle to him, all theories. 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 203 

121. Does a bird need to theorize about build- 
ing its nest, or boast of it when built? All 
good work is essentially done that way, without 
hesitation, without difficulty, without boasting ; 
and in the doers of the best, there is an inner 
and involuntary power which approximates 
literally to the instinct of an animal. Nay, I am 
certain that in the most perfect human artists, 
reason does not supersede instinct, but is added 
to an instinct as much more divine than that of 
the lower animals as the human body is more 
beautiful than theirs ; that a great singer sings 
not with less instinct than the nightingale, but 
with more, only more various, applicable, and 
governable ; that a great architect does not 
build with less instinct than the beaver or the 
bee, but with more ; with an innate cunning 
of proportion that embraces all beauty, and a 
divine ingenuity of skill that improvises all con- 
struction. But be that as it may, — be the 
instinct less or more than that of inferior ani- 
mals, like or unlike theirs, — still the human 
art is dependent on that first, and then upon 
an amount of practice, of science, and of 
imagination disciplined by thought, which the 
true possessor of it knows to be incommunicable, 
and the true critic of it inexplicable, except 
through long process of laborious years. That 
journey of life's conquest, in which hills over 



204 SESAME AND LILIES. 

hills and Alps on Alps arose and sank, — do you 
think you can make another trace it pahiifissiy, 
by talking? Why, you cannot even carry us up 
an Alp by talking. You can guide us up it, 
step by step, no otherwise ; even so, best 
silently. You girls who have been among the 
hills know how the bad guide chatters and 
gesticulates, and it is "put your foot here," 
and " mind how you balance yourself there ; " 
but the good guide walks on quietly without a 
word, only with his eyes on you when need is, 
and his arm like an iron bar if need be. 

122. In that slow -way, also, art can be taught, 
if you have faith in your guide and will let his 
arm be to you as an iron bar when need is. But 
in what teacher of art have you such faith? 
Certainly not in me ; for, as I told you at first, 
I know well enough it is only because you think 
I can talk, not because you think I know my 
business, that you let me speak to you at all. 
If I were to tell you anything that seemed to 
you strange, }ou would not believe it ; and yet 
it would only be in telling you strange things 
that I could be of use to you. I could be 
of great use to you — inlinite use — with brief 
saying, if you would believe it ; but you would 
not, just because the thing that would be 
of real use would displease you. You are all 
wild, for instance, with admiration of Gus- 



01- 77//': mvst/'Jk'y of l //'/':. 205 

tavc Dorc. Well, suppose I were lo tell you, 
in the strongest terms I eoukl use, tiuit (ius- 
tave Dor6's art was bad, — bad, not in weak- 
ness, not in failure, but bad with dreadful 
power — the power of the l'\iries and the liar- 
pies mingled — enraging and polluting; that so 
long as you looked at it, no percei)tion of pure 
or beautiful art was possible for you. Suppose 
1 were to tell you that! What would be the 
use? Woukl you look at (aistave Dore less? 
Rather more, 1 faney. On the other hand 1 
could soon put you into good humor with me if 
I chose. I know well enough what you like, 
and how to praise it to your l)etter liking. I 
could talk to you about moonlight and twilight 
and spring llowers and autumn leaves and the 
madonnas of Rai)hael — how motherly ! and the 
sibyls of Michael Angelo — how majestic ! and 
the saints of Angelico — how pious! and the 
cherubs of Correggio — how delicious ! Old as 
i am, 1 could j^lay you a tune on the harj) yet, 
that you would dance to. lUit neither you nor 
I should be a bit the better or wiser; or if we 
were, oiu" increased wisdom could be of no 
practical effect. Kor indeed, the arts, as re- 
gards teachableness, diHer from the sciences 
also in this: lli.it their power is fotnided not 
merely on facts which can be communicated, 
but on dispositions which require to be created. 



206 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Art is neither to be achieved by effort of think- 
ing nor explained by accuracy of speaking. It 
is the instinctive and necessary result of powers 
which can only be developed through the mind 
of successive generations, and which finally 
burst into life under social conditions as slow 
of growth as the faculties they regulate. Whole 
eras of mighty history are summed, and the 
passions of dead myriads are concentrated, in 
the existence of a noble art ; and if that noble 
art were among us, we should feel it and rejoice, 
not caring in the least to hear lectures on it. 
And since it is not among us, be assured we 
have to go back to the root of it, or at least, to 
the place where the stock of it is yet alive and 
the branches began to die. 

123. And now may I have your pardon for 
pointing out, partly with reference to matters 
which are at this time of greater moment than 
the arts, that if we undertook such recession to 
the vital germ of national arts that have decayed, 
we should find a more singular arrest of their 
power in Ireland than in any other European 
country. For in the eighth century Ireland pos- 
sessed a school of art in her manuscripts and 
sculpture, which in many of its qualities (appar- 
ently in all essential qualities of decorative 
invention) was quite without rival, seeming as 
if it might have advanced to tlic highest tri- 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 20/ 

umphs in architecture and in painting. But 
there was one fatal flaw in its nature by which 
it was stayed, — and stayed with a conspicuous- 
ness of pause to which there is no parallel, — so 
that long ago, in tracing the progress of Euro- 
pean schools from infancy to strength, I chose 
for the students of Kensington, in a lecture 
since published, two characteristic examples of 
early art of equal skill ; but in the one case, 
skill which was progressive ; in the other, skill 
which was at pause. In the one case, it was 
work receptive of correction — hungry for cor- 
rection ; and in the other, work which inher- 
ently rejected correction. I chose for them a 
corrigible Eve and an incorrigible angel ; and I 
grieve to say that the incorrigible angel was 
also an Irish angel ! ^ 

124. And the fatal difference lay wholly in 
this. In both pieces of art there was an equal 
falling short of the needs of fact ; but the Lom- 
bardic Eve knew she was in the wrong, and the 
Irish angel thought himself all right. The eager 
Lombardic sculptor, though firmly insisting on 
his childish idea, yet showed in the irregular 
broken touches of the features and the imper- 
fect struggle for softer lines in the form, a 
perception of beauty and law that he could not 
render ; there was the strain of effort, under 

1 See "The Two Paths," p. 27. 



208 SESAME AND LILIES. 

conscious imperfection in every line. But the 
Irish missal painter had drawn his angel with no 
sense of failure, in happy complacency, and put 
red dots into the palms of each hand and 
rounded the eyes into perfect circles, and, I 
regret to say, left the mouth out altogether, with 
perfect satisfaction to himself. 

125. May I without offence ask you to con- 
sider whether this mode of arrest in ancient 
Irish art may not be indicative of points of char- 
acter which even yet, in some measure, arrest 
your national power? I have seen much of 
Irish character, and have watched it closely, for 
I have also much loved it. And I think the 
form of failure to which it is most liable is this : 
that being generous-hearted, and wholly intend- 
ing always to do right, it does not attend to the 
external laws of right, but thinks it must neces- 
sarily do right because it means to do so, and 
therefore does wrong without finding it out ; and 
then, when the consequences of its wTong come 
upon it or upon others connected with it, it can- 
not conceive that the wrong is in anywise of its 
causing or of its doing, but flies into wTath and 
a strange agony of desire for justice, as feeling 
itself wholly innocent, which leads it farther 
astray, until there is nothing that it is not capable 
of doing with a good conscience. 

126. But mind, I do not mean to say that in 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 209 

past or present relations between Ireland and 
England, you have been wrong, and we right. 
Far from that, I believe that in all great ques- 
tions of principle, and in all details of adminis- 
tration of law, you have been usually right and 
we wrong ; sometimes in misunderstanding you, 
sometimes in resolute iniquity to you. Never- 
theless, in all disputes between States, though 
the strongest is nearly always mainly in the 
wrong, the weaker is often so in a minor degree ; 
and I think we sometimes admit the possibility 
of our being in error, and you never do. 

127. And now, returning to the broader ques- 
tion of what these arts and labors of life have to 
teach us of its mystery, this is the first of .their 
lessons : that the more beautiful the art the more 
it is essentially the work of people who feel 
themselves wrong; who are striving for the ful- 
filment of a law and the grasp of a loveliness 
which they have not yet attained, which they 
feel even farther and farther from attaining the 
more they strive for it. And yet, in still deeper 
sense, it is the work of people who know also 
that they are right. The very sense of inevi- 
table error from their purpose marks the perfect- 
ness of that purpose, and the continued sense of 
failure arises from the continued opening of the 
eyes more clearly to all the sacredest laws of 
tmth. 



212 SESAME AND LILIES. 

unchecked Alpine rivers yet run wild in devas- 
tation ; and the marshes, which a few hundred 
men could redeem with a year's labor, still blast 
their helpless inhabitants into fevered idiotism. 
That is so in the centre of Europe ! while on the 
near coast of Africa, once the Garden of the 
Hesperides, an Arab woman, but a few sunsets 
since, ate her child for famine. And with all 
the treasures of the East at our feet we, in our 
own dominion, could not find a few grains of 
rice for a people that asked of us no more ; but 
stood by and saw five hundred thousand of them 
perish of hunger. 

130. Then after agriculture, the art of kings, 
take the next head of human arts, weaving, the 
art of queens, honored of all noble heathen women 
in the person of their virgin goddess, honored of 
all Hebrew women by the word of their wisest 
king, " She layeth her hands to the spindle, and 
her hands hold the distaff; she stretcheth out 
her hand to the poor. She is not afraid of the 
snow for her household, for all her houshold are 
clothed with scarlet. She maketh herself cover- 
ing of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple. 
She maketh fine linen and selleth it, and deliv- 
ereth girdles to the merchant." What have we 
done in all these thousands of years with this 
bright art of Greek maid and Christian matron. 
Six thousand years of woa\ing and have we 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 213 

learned to weave? Might not every naked wall 
have been purple with tapestry, and every feeble 
breast fenced with sweet colors from the cold? 
What have we done ? Our fingers are too few, 
it seems, to twist together some poor covering 
for our bodies. We set our streams to work for 
us and choke the air with fire to turn our spin- 
ning-twheels ; and are we yet clothed f Are not 
the streets of the capitals of Europe foul with the 
sale of cast clouts and rotten rags ? Is not the 
beauty of your sweet children left in wretched- 
ness of disgrace, while with better honor Nature 
clothes the brood of the bird in its nest, and 
the suckling of the wolf in her den? And does 
not every winter^s snow robe what you have not 
robed, and shroud what you have not shrouded ; 
and every winter's wind bear up to heaven its 
wasted souls, to witness against you hereafter 
by the voice of their Christ, *' I was naked, 
and ye clothed me not " ? — 

131. Lastly, take the art of building, the 
strongest, proudest, most orderly, most enduring 
of the arts of man, that of which the produce is 
in the surest manner accumulative, and need not 
perish or be replaced ; but if once well done will 
stand more strongly than the unbalanced rocks, 
more prevalently than the crumbling hills. The 
art which is associated with all civic pride and 
sacred principle, with which men record their 



212 SESAME AND LILIES. 

unchecked Alpine rivers yet run wild in devas- 
tation ; and the marshes, which a few hundred 
men could redeem with a year's labor, still blast 
their helpless inhabitants into fevered idiotism. 
That is so in the centre of Europe ! while on the 
near coast of Africa, once the Garden of the 
Hesperides, an Arab woman, but a few sunsets 
since, ate her child for famine. And with all 
the treasures of the East at our feet we, in our 
own dominion, could not find a few grains of 
rice for a people that asked of us no more ; but 
stood by and saw five hundred thousand of them 
perish of hunger. 

130. Then after agriculture, the art of kings, 
take the next head of human arts, weaving, the 
art of queens, honored of all noble heathen women 
in the person of their virgin goddess, honored of 
all Hebrew women by the word of their wisest 
king, " She layeth her hands to the spindle, and 
her hands hold the distaff; she stretcheth out 
her hand to the poor. She is not afraid of the 
snow for her household, for all her houshold are 
clothed with scarlet. She maketh herself cover- 
ing of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple. 
She maketh fine linen and selleth it, and deliv- 
ereth girdles to the merchant." What have we 
done in all these thousands of years with this 
bright art of Greek maid and Christian matron. 
Six thousand years of weaving and have we 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 213 

learned to weave? Might not every naked wall 
have been purple with tapestry, and every feeble 
breast fenced with sweet colors from the cold? 
What have we done? Our fingers are too few, 
it seems, to twist together some poor covering 
for our bodies. We set our streams to work for 
us and choke the air with fire to turn our spin- 
ning-wheels ; diiid are we yet clothed? Are not 
the streets of the capitals of Europe foul with the 
sale of cast clouts and rotten rags ? Is not the 
beauty of your sweet children left in wretched- 
ness of disgrace, while with better honor Nature 
clothes the brood of the bird in its nest, and 
the suckling of the wolf in her den? And does 
not every winter's snow robe what you have not 
robed, and shroud what you have not shrouded ; 
and every winter's wind bear up to heaven its 
wasted souls, to witness against you hereafter 
by the voice of their Christ, "I was naked, 
and ye clothed me not " ? 

131. Lastly, take the art of building, the 
strongest, proudest, most orderly, most enduring 
of the arts of man, that of which the produce is 
in the surest manner accumulative, and need not 
perish or be replaced ; but if once well done will 
stand more strongly than the unbalanced rocks, 
more prevalently than the crumbling hills. The 
art which is associated with all civic pride and 
sacred principle, with which men record their 



214 SESAME AND LILIES. 

power, satisfy their enthusiasm, make sure their 
defence, define and make dear their habitation. 
And in six thousand years of building what have 
we done ? Of the greater part of all that skill 
and strength, 710 vestige is left but fallen stones 
that encumber the fields and impede the streams. 
But from this waste of disorder and of time and 
of rage, what is left to us? Constructive and 
progressive creatures that we are, with ruling 
brains and forming hands, capable of fellowship 
and thirsting for fame, can we not contend in 
comfort with the insects of the forest, or in 
achievement with the worm of the sea? The 
white surf rages in vain against the ramparts 
built by poor atoms of scarcely nascent life, but 
only ridges of formless ruin mark the places 
where once dwelt our noblest multitudes. The 
ant and the moth have cells for each of their 
young, but our little ones lie in festering heaps 
in homes that consume them like graves ; and 
night by night from the corners of our streets 
rises up the cry of the homeless, " I was a 
stranger, and ye took me not in." 

132. Must it be always thus ? Is our life for- 
ever to be without profit, without possession? 
Shall the strength of its generations be as barren 
as death, or cast away their labor as the wild 
fig-tree casts her untimely figs ? Is it all a dream 
then, the desire of the eyes and the pride of life? 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 21$ 

or, if it be, might we not live in nobler dream 
than this? The poets and prophets, the wise 
men and the scribes, though they have told us 
nothing about a life to come, have told us much 
about the life that is now. They have had, they 
also, their dreams ; and we have laughed at 
them. They have dreamed of mercy and of jus- 
tice ; they have dreamed of peace and good-will ; 
they have dreamed of labor undisappointed, and 
of rest undisturbed ; they have dreamed of ful- 
ness in harvest and overflowing in store ; they 
have dreamed of wisdom in council, and of prov- 
idence in law ; of gladness of parents, and strength 
of children, and glory of gray hairs. And at 
these visions of theirs we have mocked, and held 
them fot idle and vain, unreal and unaccomplisb- 
able. What have we accomplished with our 
realities? Is this what has come of our worldly 
wisdom, tried against their folly? this our might- 
iest possible, against their impotent ideal? or 
have we only wandered among the spectra of a 
baser felicity, and chased phantoms of the tombs, 
instead of visions of the Almighty ; and walked 
after the imaginations of our evil hearts, instead 
of after the counsels of Eternity, until our lives 
— not in the likeness of the cloud of heaven, but 
of the smoke of hell — have become " as a vapor, 
that appeareth for a Httle time, and then vanish- 
eth avv-ay"? 



21 6 SESAME AXn LILIES. 

133. Docs it vanisli, then? Are you sure of 
(luit, — sure that the nothingness of the grave 
will be a rest from this troubled nothingness; 
and that the coiling shadow, which disquiets 
itself in vain, cannot change into the smoke of 
the torment that ascends forever? Will any 
answer that they arc sure of it, and that there is 
no fear nor ho})j nor desire nor labor, whither 
they go? lie it so; will you not, then, make as 
sure of the life that now is, as you are of the 
death that is to come? Your hearts are wholly 
in this world ; will you not give them to it wisely, 
as well as perfectly? And see, tirst of all, that 
you have hearts, and sound hearts, too, to give. 
Because you have no heaven to look for, is that 
any reason that you should remain ignorant of 
this wonderl'ul and infinite earth, which is firmly 
and instantly given you in possession ? Although 
your days are numbered, and the following dark- 
ness sure, is it necessary that you shoukl share 
the degradation of the brute, because you are 
condemned to its mortality ; or live the life of the 
moth and of the worm, because you are to com- 
panion them in the dust? Not so; we may have 
but a few thousands of days to spend, perhaps 
hundreds only, perhaps tens ; nay, the longest of 
our time and best, looked back on, will be but as 
a moment, as the twinkling of an eye ; still we are 
men, not insects ; we are living spirits, not pass- 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 21/ 

ing clouds. *' He maketh the winds His messen- 
gers ; the momentary fire, Plis minister;" and 
shall we do less than tJicse / Let us do the work 
of men while we bear the form of them ; and as we 
snatch our narrow portion of time out of eter- 
nity, snatch also our narrow inheritance of jms- 
sion out of immortality, — even though our lives 
be as a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, 
and then vanisheth away. 

134. But there are some of you who l^elieve 
not this ; who think this cloud of life has no 
such close, that it is to float, revealed and illu- 
minjd, upon the floor of heaven, in the day 
when He com::;th with clouds, and every eye 
shall see Him. Some day, you believe, within 
these five or ten or twenty years, for every one 
of us the judgment will be set, and the books 
opened. If that be true, far more than that 
must be true. Is there but one day of judgment? 
Why, for us every day is a day of judgment, — 
every day is a dies ir(^, and writes its irrevocable 
verdict in the flame of its west. Think you that 
judgment waits till the doors of the grave are 
opened.^ It waits at the doors of your houses, 
it waits at the corners of your streets. We are 
in the midst of judgment ; the insects that we 
crush are our judges, the moments we fret 
away are our judges, the elements that feed us 
judge as they minister, and the pleasures that 



2l8 SESAME AND LILIES. 

deceive us judge as they indulge. Let us, for our 
lives, do the work of men while we bear the form 
of them, if indeed those lives are not as a vapor, 
and do not vanish away. 

135. " The work of men," — and what is that ? 
Well, we may any oi us know very quickly, on 
the condition of being wholly ready to do it. 
But many of us are for the most part thinking, 
not of what we are to do, but of what we are to 
get ; and the best of us are sunk into the sin of 
Ananias, and it is a mortal one. — we want to 
keep back part of the price. A\\(\. we continually 
talk of taking up our cross, as if the only harm 
in a cross was the uvVi,'/// of it, — as if it was 
only a thing to be carried, instead of to be 
crucified upon. " They that are His have cruci- 
fied the tlosh with the allections and lusts." 
Does that mean, think you, that in time of na- 
tional distress, of religious trial, of crisis for every 
interest and hoi)e of humanity, none of us will 
cease jesting, none cease idling, none put them- 
selves to any wholesome work, none take so 
much as a tag of lace oiT their footman's coats, 
to save the world ? Or does it rather mean, that 
they are ready to lea\e houses, lands, and kin- 
dreds. — yes, and life, if need be? Life! — 
some of us are ready enough to throw that away, 
joyless as we have made it. But '' s/ut/on in 
life," — how many of us are ready to quit t/idt f 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 219 

Is it not always tlie great objection where there 
is question of finding something useful to do, 
" We cannot leave our stations in life "? 

Those of us who really cannot, — that is to 
say, who can only maintain themselves by con- 
tinuing in some business or salaried office, — 
have already something to do ; and all that they 
have to see to is, that they do it honestly and 
with all their might. But with most people who 
use that apology " remaining in the station of 
life to which Providence has called them " means 
keeping all the carriages and all the footmen 
and large houses they can possibly pay for ; and 
once for all, I say that if ever Providence did 
put them into stations of tliat sort, which is not 
at all a matter of certainfy. Providence is just 
now very distinctly calling them out again. 
Levi's station in life was the receipt of custom ; 
and Peter's, the shore of (Galilee; and Paul's, 
the ante-chambers of the High Priest; which 
" station in life " each had to leave, with brief 
notice. 

And whatever our station in life may be at 
this crisis, those of us who mean to fulfil our 
duty ought, first, to live on as little as we can ; 
and secondly, to do all the wholesome work for 
it we can, and to spend all we can spare in 
doing all the sure good we can. 

And sure good is first in feeding people, then 



220 SESAME AND LILIES. 

in dressing people, then in lodging people, and 
lastly, in rightly pleasing people with arts or 
sciences, or any other subject of thought. 

136. I say first in feeding; and once for all 
do not let yourselves be deceived by any of the 
common talk of " indiscriminate charity." The 
order to us is not to feed the deserving hungry, 
nor the industrious hungry, nor the amiable and 
well-intentioned hungry, — but simply to feed 
the hungry. It is quite true, infallibly true, 
that if any man will not work, neither should he 
eat ; think of that, and every time you sit down 
to your dinner, ladies and gentlemen, say sol- 
emnly before you ask a blessing, " How much 
work have I done to-day for my dinner ? " But 
the proper way to enforce that order on those 
below you, as well as on yourselves, is not to 
leave vagabonds and honest people to starve to- 
gether ; but very distinctly to discern and seize 
your vagabond, and shut your vagabond up out 
of honest people's way, and very sternly then 
see that until he has worked he does not eat. 
But the first thing is to be sure you have the food 
to give ; and therefore to enforce the organiza- 
tion of vast activities in agriculture and in com- 
merce, for the production of the wholesomest 
food, and proper storing and distribution of it, 
so that no famine shall any more be possible 
among civilized beings. There is plenty of work 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 221 

in this business alone, and at once, for any num- 
ber of people who like to engage in it. 

137. Secondly, dressing people, — that is to 
sav, urging every one within reach of your in- 
fluence to be always neat and clean, and giving 
them means of being so. In so far as they abso- 
lutely refuse, you must give up the effort with 
respect to them, only taking care that no chil- 
dren within your sphere of influence shall any 
more be brought up with such habits ; and that 
every person who is willing to dress with pro- 
priety shall have encouragement to do so. And 
the first absolutely necessary step towards this 
is the gradual adoption of a consistent dress for 
different ranks of persons, so that their rank 
shall be known by their dress, and the restric- 
tion of the changes of fashion within certain 
limits. All which appears for the present quite 
impossible : but it is only so far as even difficult 
as it is difficult to conquer our vanity, frivolity, 
and desire to appear what we are not. And it is 
not, nor ever shall be creed of'mine, that these 
mean and shallow vices are unconquerable by 
Christian women. 

138. And then, thirdly, lodging people,—- 
which you may think should have been put first, 
but I put it third, because we must feed and 
clothe people where we find them, and lodge 
them afterwards. And providing lodgment for 



222 SESAME AND LILIES. 

them means a great deal of vigorous legislation, 
and cutting down of vested interests that stand in 
the way ; and after that, or before that, so far as 
we can get it, thorough sanitary and remedial 
action in the houses that we have, and then the 
building of more, strongly, beautifully, and in 
groups of limited extent, kept in proportion to 
their streams, and walled round, so that there 
may be no festering and wretched suburb any- 
where, but clean and busy street within, and the 
open country without, with a belt of beautiful 
garden and orchard round the walls, so that from 
any part of the city perfectly fresh air and grass 
and sight of far horizon might be reachable 
in a few minutes' walk. This the final aim ; but 
in immediate action every minor and possible 
good to be instantly done, when and as we can ; 
roofs mended that have holes in them, fences 
patched that have gaps in them, walls buttressed 
that totter, and floors propped that shake ; clean- 
liness and order enforced with our own hands 
and eyes, till we are breathless, every day. 
And all the fine arts will healthily follow. I 
myself have washed a flight of stone stairs all 
down with bucket and broom, in a Savoy inn, 
where they hadn't washed their stairs since they 
first went up them ; and I never made a better 
sketch than that afternoon. 

139. These, then, are the three first needs of 



OF THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 223 

civilized life ; and the law for every Christian 
man and woman is, that they shall be in direct 
service towards one of these three needs as far 
as is consistent with their own special occupation, 
and if they have no special business, then wholly 
in one of these services. And out of such exer- 
tion in plain duty, all other good will come ; for 
in this direct contention with material evil, you 
will find out the real nature of all evil ; you will 
discern by the various kinds of resistance what 
is really the fault and main antagonism to good ; 
also you will find the most unexpected helps and 
profound lessons given, and truths will come 
thus down to us which the speculation of all our 
lives would never have raised us up to. You 
will find nearly every educational problem solved 
as soon as you truly want to do something; 
everybody will become of use in their own fittest 
way, and will learn what is best for them to know 
in that use. Competitive examination will then, 
and not till then, be wholesome, because it will 
be daily and calm and in practice ; and on these 
familiar arts and minute but certain and service- 
able knowledges, will be surely edified and sus- 
tained the greater arts and splendid theoretical 
sciences. 

140. But much more than this. On such 
holy and simple practice will be founded, indeed, 
at last, an infallible religion. The greatest of 



224 SESAME AND LILIES. 

all the mysteries of life, and the most terrible, 
is the corruption of even the sincerest religion 
which is not daily founded on rational, effective, 
humble, and helpful action. Helpful action, 
observe ! for there is just one law, which obeyed, 
keeps all religions pure ; forgotten, makes them 
all false. Whenever in any religious faith, dark 
or bright, we allow our minds to dwell upon the 
points in which we differ from other people, we 
are wrong, and in the devil's power. That is 
the essence of the Pharisee's thanksgiving, — 
'* Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other men 
are." At every moment of our lives we should 
be trying to find out, not in what we differ with 
other people, but in what we agree with them ; 
and the moment we find we can agree as to any- 
thing that should be done, kind or good (and 
who but fools couldn't?), then do it ; push at it 
together, — you can't quarrel in a side-by-side 
push ; but the moment that even the best men 
stop pushing and begin talking, they mistake 
their pugnacity for piety, and it's all over. I will 
not speak of the crimes which in past times have 
been committed in the name of Christ, nor of 
the follies which are at this hour held to be con- 
sistent with obedience to Him ; but I will speak 
of the morbid corruption and waste of vital power 
in religious sentiment, by which the pure strength 
of that which should be the guiding soul of every 



( " THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 225 

nation, thf -^lendor of its youthful manhood and 
spotless l^^nt of its maidenhood, is averted or 
cast away. You may see continually girls who 
have never been taught to do a single useful 
thing thoroughly ; who cannot sew, who cannot 
cook, who cannot cast an account, nor prepare 
a medicine, whose whole life has been passed 
either in play or in pride ; you will find girls like 
these, when they are earnest-hearted, cast all 
their innate passion of religious spirit, which 
was meant by God to support them through the 
irksomeness of daily toil, into grievous and vain 
meditation over the meaning of the great Book, 
of which no syllable was ever yet to be under- 
stood but through a deed ; all the instinctive 
wisdom and mercy of their womanhood made 
vain, and the glory of ;^-: ">- pure consciences 
warped into fruitless ago^iy concerning questions 
which the laws of common serviceable life would 
have either solved for them in an instant, or 
kept out of their way. Ci .e sUch a girl any 
true work that will make her active in the dawn 
and weary at^night, with the consciousness that 
her fellow-creatures have indeed been the better I 
for her day, and the powerless sorrc.w of her .' 
enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty / 
of radiant and beneficent peace. 

So with our youths. We once taught them 
to make Latin verses, and called them educated ; 



226 SESAM-- 

now we teach them to ieajj and tr.. w, to hit a 
ball with a bat, and call them .o' ■ t.-:d. Can 
they plough, can they sow, can they pk A ^t the 
right time, or build with a steady hand? Is it 
the effo.-t of their lives to be chaste, knightly, 
faithful, holy in thought, lovely in word and 
deed? Indeed it is with some, nay, with many, 
and the strength of England is in them, and the 
hope; but we have to turn their co: -».- from 
the toil of war to the toil of mercy, and their in- 
tellect from dispute of words to discernment of 
things, and their knighthood from the errantry 
of adventure to the state and fidelity of a kingly 
power. And then, indeed, shall abide for them 
and for us an incorruptible felicity and an infalli- 
ble religion ; shall abide for us Faith, no more 
to be assailed by temptation, no more to be de- 
fended by wrath and by fear ; shall abide with us 
Hope, no more to be quenched by the years that 
overwhelm, or made ashamed by the shadows 
that betray ; shall abide for us and with us, the 
greatest o/ these, — the abiding will, the abiding 
name, of oar Father. For the greatest of these 
is Charity. 

THE END. 



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